


Don't Fear the Reaper

by pinstripedJackalope



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Apocalypse Prevented, Buried Alive, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Dark, Dead Reginald Hargreeves, Divergent at S1E10, Ghosts, Gore, Graphic Description, Grief/Mourning, Horror Elements, Hurt Klaus Hargreeves, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, It's not all bad I swear, Klaus Hargreeves Needs A Hug, Klaus Hargreeves Needs Help, Klaus Hargreeves Whump, Klaus Hargreeves-centric, Klaus is a little OOC but I promise there's a reason, M/M, Major Character Injury, Mental Health Issues, No Incest, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Reggie shows up rip, Reginald Hargreeves' A+ Parenting, Reincarnated Dave Katz, Reincarnation, Self-Harm, Sober Klaus Hargreeves, Suicide, Temporary Character Death, Vomiting, Whump, it's just.... intense, klaus causes the apocalypse, not that kind of dark haha, repeated character death
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-11-27
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:42:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 36,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27297340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinstripedJackalope/pseuds/pinstripedJackalope
Summary: Klaus Hargreeves dies the night the apocalypse should have been.  He comes back, though!  Just... you know... in his casket.  Which is decidedly not ideal.  This is that story.Aka a Klaus/Life slowburn with some family feels and romance on the side.
Relationships: Ben Hargreeves & Klaus Hargreeves, Klaus Hargreeves & Everyone, Klaus Hargreeves & God, Klaus Hargreeves/David "Dave" Katz, Number Five | The Boy & Ben Hargreeves, Number Five | The Boy & Vanya Hargreeves
Comments: 164
Kudos: 464





	1. The Party's Poppin', Wouldn't You Say?

**Author's Note:**

> God, okay, so this fic is pretty dark. The tags give a lot of it away--I tried to tag any triggers, but if I forgot any I'll make sure to add them. If you want me to give you trigger warnings at the start of every chapter I can certainly do that, but only if people need me to. I will try and update once a week but as a heads up, updates may be sporadic. Chapter count is subject to change.
> 
> Hope you enjoy!

_March 29th, 2019. Early morning, some hours before sunrise. An alleyway outside a rave._

“You’re acting… weird.”

“I feel weird.”

“You didn’t take that pill, did you? I thought you threw it away.”

“No, no I…”

The words peter away. Ben, watching, raises an eyebrow as Klaus trails off, his eyes distant. He doesn’t seem like he’s going to finish his sentence.

Ben frowns. It’s been five minutes since Klaus stood up from cracking his head open on the dance floor and left the rave in search of Luther, sluggish blood still seeping down the side of his neck, and Ben is not convinced that he’s okay to be walking around. His powers—the undercurrent of spectral energy that Klaus always emanates unless he’s high—cut out for a few minutes while he was down. Ben doesn’t know precisely what happened, seeing as he couldn’t exactly check his brother for a pulse at the time, but he doesn’t think it was good.

Pursing his lips, he slows his pace, forcing Klaus to slow as well. “You’re weirding me out. What the hell is up with you?”

It takes Klaus a moment to respond, and when he does, it doesn’t make Ben feel any better. “If I tell you something…” he says, and pauses for a moment. “…You have to promise to believe me.”

“Uh—”

“I’m serious, Ben. You have to—you just—you have to believe me, okay?” His eyes, large and shining strangely under the streetlights, stare into Ben’s as a high giggle begins to build in his throat. He’s shaking, his hands trembling, the laughter bubbling slowly out until he can barely get the words out between each giggle. “Because if you don’t—if you don’t believe me I’m going to do something really, _really_ reckless.”

Ben does not like the look in his brother’s eyes. “Klaus…” he says, not sure what’s going on and not convinced that he wants to know.

Klaus doesn’t back down. “ _Please_ ,” he says.

For a moment the two of them are at an impasse, staring at each other, having both stopped walking in the middle of the alleyway. Unfortunately, Ben always seems to be the first to break. It takes a moment or two, but Ben can’t resist those puppy-dog eyes forever. “Yes, yes, okay, fuck. I’ll believe you,” he sighs, and scrubs a hand through his hair.

Instead of doing any number of his usual victory dances, Klaus just takes a deep breath, his hands pressed to his mouth. He’s staring into the middle distance, eyes as round as they’ll go. Ben frowns at him, waiting… until all at once Klaus lowers his hands and blurts out, “I can’t die.”

Ben blinks. “…Come again?” he asks, wondering if he himself died with some earwax in his ears.

“I can’t… I can’t die. Or I can, but I come back.”

Not what Ben was expecting, exactly. “Uh… hm,” he says.

“I’m serious, Ben.” Klaus twitches, coming alive as he starts to pace. “I died and went into the afterlife and God was a little girl and I met Dad and got this _fantastic_ shave and then I got yeeted back out and—and—and why are you looking at me like that?”

Ben stares, trying to process the downpour of words that just burst out of Klaus. He can’t. “Klaus, uh… maybe we should go home,” he says, wary eyes on the glimmer of blood now trailing down Klaus's collar bone.

Klaus stares for a moment longer, his expression slowly falling. Then he whirls away, dragging his hands down his cheeks. “Fuck, you don’t believe me.”

Ben groans, raising a hand in a half-hearted gesture. “It’s not that I don’t believe you! Well, maybe it is. It’s just that you hit your head pretty hard back there, and—”

Klaus huffs another laugh, this one short and harsh. Then he veers off further down the alleyway, past Ben, and picks up…a beer bottle?

“What are you—?”

Ben is only halfway through the question when Klaus reels around and shatters the bottom of the bottle on the alley wall. He pulls back, breath harsh, holding the broken top like he’s wielding a sword. Ben dances away despite the fact that it would go right through him. “Whoa, whoa, what the fuck, man—?” he says, and it comes out sounding a lot less miffed and a lot more scared than he intends. 

Klaus pauses, staring down at his hands. There’s something wild in his eyes. “You don’t believe me,” he says, and his voice is distant, empty.

Ben takes a step forward. “I didn’t say that—”

“No, no, it’s—it’s impossible to believe,” Klaus says, stepping back at the same time, the broken bottle still in his hand. “I’d be having some trouble believing it if my useless junkie brother claimed to have died and met God. But I can—I can prove it to you. She’s not going to be happy, but I can—I can prove it—”

Ben’s entire being runs cold. “Klaus—”

“—all it will take is a couple little cuts—”

“—Klaus, hey, listen to me—”

“—it’ll be easy, just—”

“—no no no, come on, man, I believe you—”

“—don’t worry I’ll be right back, I’ll be—”

“—oh, god, oh, god—”

“—yeah! God! That’s exactly who I’m going to see!” Klaus laughs again, harsh and grating, and raises the glass to his wrist. 

Without thinking, Ben lunges for him. He intends to grab him by the arms, to hold him down until he drops that _damn piece of glass_ , but in his panic he forgets that he’s incorporeal and ends up diving straight through his brother. 

He yells, something unintelligible even to himself, and with a jolt he’s back in front of Klaus, having jumped through the air to appear before him. Klaus pays no mind, despite the goosebumps on his skin from Ben falling through him, trying to position the glass for maximum effect. And, look—Ben doesn’t feel much emotion-wise as a ghost, just little blips here and there. But right now? Right now it’s _all terror_. Because he’s seen Klauss OD. He’s seen his brother dumpster dive and eat dirty bagels out of the trash. He’s even seen him smash a snowglobe into his own face. But in all the time he’s followed him, in all the time he’s haunted Klaus, he’s never seen him do anything like _this_. 

Klaus makes a triumphant noise, the glass now angled parallel to the bones in his arm. Ben remembers the morbid saying that Allison picked up once when they were kids, that _down the road not across the street_ one, and he thinks he would feel sick if he was still alive. Klaus’s hand is shaking, the point of the glass skittering against his skin, and his laughter is getting hysterical now as he chokes out, “ _No one believes me, no one ever believes me_ —”

God, Ben has to _do something_. He starts toward Klaus again, but this time when he starts to go through him he stops, Klaus’s hands in his stomach. When Klaus pulls back to see what he’s doing, Ben moves with him, until Klaus bumps up against a wall and Ben is right there, right in his face, hands raised like blinders to keep Klaus’s attention on him and only him.

“Klaus, listen to me, listen to me right now—you _don_ _’t have to do this_ ,” he says. “You don’t have to prove a point to me. You say you’ve met God, then okay, you’ve met God. Weirder things have happened, right? _Right_? I have a portal to an eldritch hell dimension in my stomach, who am I to doubt you?”

Klaus doesn’t put the glass down… but neither does he drive it into his arm. Ben takes that as a win, looking up into his brother’s face. Klaus is still shaking, so pale, and the blood is oozing down his neck and… god, he looks so vulnerable. 

It’s not a look that Ben is used to. He’s used to cheerful smiles and smarmy grins, a mouth always ready with a joke or a deflection or an outright lie. He’s not used to Klaus looking at him like he’s _searching_ , like he’s not sure what he’s going to find.

“Do you promise?” he asks, after a long moment. His voice is a thin rasp, clogged with emotion. “Do you promise you believe me?”

Ben nods. “Yes. Okay? Yes. I promise. I believe you. All those ODs make a hell of a lot more sense knowing that you can’t freaking die, okay, _yes_. Now drop the glass, Klaus. Please.”

For a moment nothing changes, and Ben fears that he’s about to lose everything he has left. Then the glass drops, pinging off the concrete. “Okay. Yeah, yeah, okay,” Klaus says, and scrubs a hand over his face. “I… I’m sorry for scaring you, I… it’s just a lot to process right now.”

“I know,” Ben says, stepping back carefully. He’s half-convinced that Klaus is going to pull one of his god-awful SIKE moments, but Klaus doesn’t. Instead, he just stands there, his hands trembling, slowly pulling himself back together.

“Okay,” he says, after a beat of silence. “So, uh… any idea where to look for Luther?”

Ben swallows, though he has no saliva in his mouth. It’s more reflex than anything. He’s not really sure about Luther, at this point—and he’s not sure it’s a good idea to keep Klaus out any longer, anyway. That head wound… and then whatever the heck just happened… god. No. It’s time to get the hell out of here.

That decided, he shakes his head. “He’s long gone. Disappeared with that girl. I think we should just go home.”

“Wait, but… what about all that shit about how he’s not ready for the real world?” Klaus asks.

“I take it back. He’ll make it one night on his own. He’s Luther, he’ll figure it out.”

“But—”

“Klaus. Please.”

“No, I can’t—”

God, the one time Ben agrees with Klaus and Klaus changes his mind, ugh! “You were ready to quit before, why not now?” he asks. Demands, really.

Klaus twitches, looking off to the side as if he’ll see Luther there if he tries hard enough. He’s sweaty and pale and he just looks so _off_ that it’s _jarring_. Especially when he opens his mouth to say, “Because you were right. I’m a selfish prick, and I need to think about someone other than myself for once.”

It’s like a kick in the gut. Or the closest approximation that Ben can remember from being alive, anyway. “You did your best,” he says, frowning. He has no idea where that even _came_ from. Klaus? Now _agreeing_ with him? Something is very wrong.

Klaus snorts. “You and I both know that my ‘best’ is shit, buddy.”

Ben scuffs one shoe on the ground, half out of frustration and half out of a sudden nervousness that is rising in his gut, telling him that he’s making a mess of this, just like he always did when he was alive. It’s not a pleasant feeling. “…You died for him. I’d be a monster if I asked more from you after I knew that you gave your life.”

A dismissive wave of a hand— _Goodbye_ —and Klaus turns, ready to carry on to whatever destination he’s come up with next. He looks unsteady on his feet, though, so instead of following along Ben jerks his head and starts walking East—toward the Academy, toward home.

It takes a moment, but soon enough Klaus begins to follow.

They needn’t have worried, anyway. Luther is fine. At least Ben assumes so, from the… noises… that are coming from his room. He seems to be rather enjoying himself, in fact.

Ben and Klaus exchange a look. Then Klaus bursts into laughter, stuffing his knuckles in his mouth to muffle it. Ben just groans, phasing through the wall into Klaus’s room. He’s never really appreciated the fact that Klaus’s room was soundproofed when they were kids until just now.

For a moment all is blissfully silent. Klaus comes into the room, closing the door behind him. Then, because he grew up around Klaus and Klaus’s bad habits have rubbed off on him, Ben blurts out, “Hey… can I ask you something?”

“Hm?” Klaus says, feeling along the floor for the sweats he sleeps in.

“How many… how many times do you think you’ve died?”

Klaus hums. “It’s hard to tell, honestly. I don’t remember dying before this, but it must have happened. Right? People don’t survive the shit I survive. And God _really_ doesn’t like me, so it stands to reason that we’ve met before.” His face creases in thought as his hands falter. Then, slowly… “That time I ODed on heroin, probably? I remember getting shocked back to life.”

Ben raises a finger. He remembers that time, too—Klaus’s powers were out then, too, now that he thinks about it… but maybe that has more to do with the drugs than the dying.

“And that one time on benzos, when I woke up in that alleyway,” Klaus continues.

Ben raises a second finger.

“And once in Vietnam, I think, after I got shot. They seemed really surprised that I survived that much blood loss, at least.”

A third finger. Klaus is thinking harder now, staring at a wall. “Am I missing any?” he asks.

“Maybe that time you got that bad batch of cocaine?” Ben says, tentative.

Klaus perks up. “Oh, yeah! Nearly forgot about that one!”

“And the OD just before Dad’s funeral, too.”

“Right, right. So that makes four ODs, one shooting, and one head-cracking-open.”

“At the very least.”

“Wow… I sure do die a lot, huh?”

“That you do,” Ben says, and then looks away as Klaus strips to pull on his sleep clothes. He doesn’t keep his eyes off his brother for long, though—there’s some undercurrent inside of him, some strange twisted tension, that builds up when he looks away from his brother. Fear, he realizes, a moment late—the fear that if he doesn’t watch closely enough his brother is going to slip right through his fingers.

Klaus goes to sleep, and Ben watches over him, watches his chest as it rises and falls, like a silent sentinel, motionless, all night long.

***

_April 1st, 2019. Some time after dark. The Super Star Lanes bowling alley._

It hasn’t been very long since Klaus’s last death when Klaus again dies. Three days, to be exact… and that’s only if you squint, seeing as the last death occurred so early in the morning. This one, on the other hand… god. It happens the day the apocalypse would have been, and Ben… he should have seen it coming. He really should have. But he didn’t. And this time, fate isn’t quite so kind to his brother.

It starts a little something like…

…this.

“The lanes! Let’s go!”

The siblings scatter, taking a running start toward the bowling lanes as all around them bullets hail down. Ben is sticking close to Klaus—not close enough to touch him or impede his sight, but definitely close enough that he’d be able to hear Klaus’s breath, harsh in his chest from years of smoking, if it weren’t for the cacophony of shots and shouts and ricochets. 

They’re the last through the gap at the end of their lane, Klaus crashing through with a graceless belly flop that lands him on his back on the floor. He scrambles up in an ungainly lurch, limbs jerking. He has a look in his eyes that Ben recognizes instantly—that’s the panic of a flashback. He’s still mostly here, adrenaline keeping him moving, but Ben isn’t sure how long he’s going to stay that way. 

For the moment he’s okay, though, following along as Luther and Diego usher them out toward the back of the establishment. They hit the pavement moments later, the lot of them taking off toward the Icarus Theater at a dead run. They have, as Klaus would say, places to bop and sisters to stop.

It takes so long to get there, and yet it feels like no time at all. That might just be being dead screwing with Ben’s head, but he feels like Klaus’s heaving breath—which he can now hear—is growing faster, or the world is growing slower, or both. They are running out of time to stop this thing, to stop _Vanya_ … what if they don’t make it? What if they get there just as she blows? Ben is already dead, a fate he’s come to terms with at this point, but he’s one hundred percent _not_ on board with seeing his siblings join him all in one fell swoop.

They reach the theater a moment later, skidding through the front hall and climbing the stairs to the doors that lead to the auditorium. Klaus immediately leans back against a wall, gasping for air. Allison, meanwhile, is scribbling on her notepad—she gets their attention, holding it up before Luther and Diego go barging inside. _I need to go alone_ , it says. 

Ben, who knows his siblings inside and out, can already tell where this is going. Luther is going to let her go in alone as a distraction, and then he and Diego are going to charge in, metaphorical guns blazing, to take Vanya out, leaving Klaus as the lookout. Aaand sure enough, there they go, Allison sprinting ahead into the theater’s auditorium while Luther gathers the team (minus Five, and where did he get off to?) and heads off… leaving Klaus at the entrance hall.

“The _lookout_?” Klaus says, still huffing.

Diego rolls his eyes, already up the steps. “Come on, man, you’re out of breath from a little run,” he says, and then before Klaus can argue further they’re gone, heading down the hall.

_Sounds about right_ , Ben thinks, and pulls up beside Klaus, who now has his hands on his knees. He’s trying to catch his breath but it isn’t working, his lungs wheezing pathetically. “Really?” Ben asks, as Klaus groans. He knew Klaus was out of shape, but jesus. Then he catches sight of Klaus’s face. It’s pulled tight, a grimace of pain, pale and way too sweaty. “Uh… you good?” Ben asks.

Klaus wheezes again, and slowly raises a hand to his side. When he pulls back, it’s coated in red.

Ben and Klaus both stare for a long moment. Then, as one, they meet each others’ eyes and go, “Ah, _shit_.”

***

Trying to get Klaus to do what he’s supposed to be doing has always been like wrangling a toddler. It’s only gotten more difficult in the last thirteen years, what with Ben being dead and all. Trying to guide Klaus in the right direction when he’s stoned out of his mind and Ben can’t even touch him… god, it’s hellish.

When he’s wounded, bleeding, and lost to a flashback, however? Turns out that’s _ten times worse_.

“For the love of god, _please_ stay still,” Ben begs, dancing in front of Klaus with his hands raised in a ‘stop’ gesture. “You’re making yourself bleed faster, just—let’s sit down for a bit, okay?”

Klaus, eyes flitting back and forth wildly as he stumbles forward, twitches but doesn’t stop. He looks so small and scared, god… this flashback is a doozy. Ben doesn’t know exactly what brought it on—the smell of blood? Burnt flesh? The pain?—but though Klaus fought it, joking and following the breathing exercises that Ben counted out for him, it still slipped like a veil over his eyes. Klaus is far gone now, as if in a trance, following, as far as Ben can tell, the sound of orchestral instruments sweeping down the hallway, a sound which Ben can only assume he associates with home, with Vanya practicing long into the night, with safety. 

Ben glances back toward the doors to the auditorium, the ones that Allison and then Diego and Luther passed through just moments ago. They’re still slightly ajar, heavy, ornate oak resting on oiled hinges. Klaus is heading unerringly toward them, toward Vanya, toward danger.

And Ben is helpless to stop him.

Not for a lack of trying. “Come on, come on, just take a deep breath and put pressure on your side, okay? The others will be back for you soon,” he says, but Klaus is single-minded, bloody hand dragging along the wall and leaving behind long, red streaks on the decor. He’s there a moment later, hitting the door with his shoulder. He shudders, clutching at the wood, and then pushes through, stumbling and ducking away from things that Ben cannot see.

The scene inside is something out of a movie. There’s Vanya, on the stage, playing with all her might. Her eyes are ghostly white, visible even at this distance, and a soft smile graces her face as she looks down at Allison, who stands at the end of the aisle close to the stage. Behind Allison, further down the aisle, are Diego and Luther, gesturing about who goes which way to attack the stage. And then behind them is Klaus, barely upright, trailing drops of blood that sink into the dark carpet. 

“Klaus, stop. You’re going to get hurt—” Ben says, a last attempt to sway his brother, but Klaus still pays no mind. 

Several things then happen in quick succession.

One—at the very last instant, just before Diego and Luther split up to head around the audience in either direction, Klaus stumbles into their huddle, distracting them both.

Two—Ben hears dozens of footsteps coming from behind him, through the open doors of the auditorium, and turns in time to see the gas-masked weirdos from the bowling alley advancing down the hallway after them.

Three—shots begin to ring out, machine-gun fire echoing across the auditorium, and—

Four—Vanya sees the shooters, sees Allison ducking down into the seating, sees Diego and Luther dragging Klaus out of sight… and lights up, _literally_ , with a snarl that twists just under her glowing eyes. Her bow swings out in an arc, a flash of white light cracking like a whip through the air. Ben ducks on instinct, watching as the light cuts through the first wave of shooters—but more are coming, so many more, and Five has now appeared as well, ducking down with the others, and Vanya is back to playing now, ignoring the audience and the orchestra around her running for the emergency exits, and power is flowing freely from her, and her clothes and violin and even her hair are turning white, the color racing outward like a storm surge wherever her power touches—

It’s chaos. Pure and simple. Chaos, but… she’s protecting them, even as she plays. The shooters go down as fast as they come, thrown back by Vanya’s free-flowing power. The bullets stop in midair, falling leaden to the ground, and still she plays and plays and plays until finally no more shooters come and the last note rings on the air, Vanya pale and strong as her white bow rises from her white violin.

For a moment everything is still. Ben stands in the aisle, looking up at his sister. She’s glorious like this, swathed all in white like an avenging angel. 

Then she blinks, the white of her eyes fading out. She shudders, and staggers, and then Allison is there, catching her as she goes limp.

They wait a moment, but nothing else happens. She’s out, her rampage over, and they are free to take stock. To count their losses.

Pogo is dead.

Mom is gone.

The house has been leveled, but…

…the day has been saved. The apocalypse is no more.

It’s not the worst mission they’ve ever been on, Ben thinks, and his shoulders sag in relief. Like for real, they’ve had some SHIT missions. This probably isn’t even in their top ten worst missions.

Or so he thinks. Until Diego cries out, bringing his attention back to Klaus. Klaus, who’s sitting on the floor propped up against a seat, hand on the gunshot wound on his side, his head lolling. His eyes don’t focus as Diego lifts his head. He stares distantly, his face a pale gray.

_Oh, no_ , Ben thinks, and suddenly he’s there next to his brother, reaching out. He can’t touch, but still he knows—Klaus is bleeding out. He’s dying, and it will be a miracle if they get help in time.

“Whoa, whoa, stay awake,” Diego says, tapping Klaus’s face as his eyes slip closed. Klaus opens them again, gaze roving. Diego curses, something about _holding on, you asshole_ , but Klaus is too far gone. Five is gone, he’s disappeared to go get help but they don’t have time. Luther is holding pressure on the wound now, his huge hands over Klaus’s own, but it’s not helping—Klaus has lost too much already, and Luther knows this, his face twisted in panic.

“We need help,” he says, just as Five reappears.

“No shit,” Five says, pacing back and forth. “I called nine-one-one from the front desk but they’ll take time to get here. Reggie had contacts but the house is leveled, it’ll take too long to find his phone book and contact someone, if it’s even still intact. Grace is gone, so there’s no help there. We’re not close enough to a hospital for me to jump straight there with him… _fuck_! I don’t know what to _do_!”

He kicks a seat, and then whirls around, a wild look in his eyes, and disappears again.

“Do you think he thought of something?” Luther asks. No one responds, as Klaus decides at that moment to slump sideways into Diego’s side, eyelids fluttering.

“Shit!” Diego says, grabbing him. He shifts Klaus down until his head is in Diego’s lap, hands limp at his sides. Ben hovers anxiously, looking down at his brother. His gaze finds the dog tags that he’s been wearing for days now, lit as the auditorium lights glint off of them, shining between the splatters of blood. Klaus’s eyes stare up, meeting Ben’s at last… and then he takes one last rattling breath and those eyes go glassy, the life behind them burning out all at once.

“No,” Diego says, and then—“ _NO_!”

But it’s too late. Klaus is gone. Ben feels the undercurrent, that flow of spectral energy, flatline, and he knows. Klaus is _gone_.

But maybe… just maybe… he’ll come back.

***

Ben has it figured out. Or at least he thinks he does. It’s simple, really—Klaus managed to walk off a fatal head trauma not three days ago in about twelve minutes flat. He’s come back from ODs in three hours tops, every time. Ben wasn’t there for the shooting, but he imagines the timeline was similar. Ergo, if Klaus is coming back, it should be in the next few minutes. An hour or two at most. Right? Right.

With this in mind, Ben settles down on his haunches next to Klaus’s body. Diego is panicking, clutching at their brother and trying to do CPR, to circulate whatever blood is left. Luther is still holding steady pressure, his face grim. Allison is crying, clutching an unconscious Vanya. Five is gone. And Ben… he’s going to sit here until his brother comes back or he doesn’t.

If it’s meant to be, then Klaus will sit up before they even get him to the morgue.

Ben says so, even though they can’t hear him. It helps, to speak it aloud. Even when Luther slowly sits back and Diego lets out this anguished yell, flinging nasty words at him in desperation. Five appears again, grim, and takes in the scene. There are sirens in the distance, wailing ever closer, but they will be little help at this point. It’s up to God, now. The little girl. Or whatever higher power that brings Klaus back whenever his heart stops beating.

Unfortunately, the world isn't content to wait. The paramedics arrive too soon. Barely a minute later and there they are, swarming the place. They seem taken aback by the carnage, understandably—and by the screaming that Diego is directing at Luther, and Five, and anyone who tries to inform him that yes, Klaus is indeed dead. In the end, the police are called, which gives them some time—two officers come and wind up holding Diego back so the paramedics can load Klaus into the ambulance to take him away, no siren, with Ben standing, resolute, at his side.

The last thing Ben hears before the doors close is Diego’s hoarse voice, saying, “You’re an _asshole_ , Rodrigues.”

They get to the hospital soon after that, where they go directly to the morgue. It’s here that Ben starts to panic a little. They’re going to put Klaus in a freezer, he knows from experience. Klaus has been dead barely fifteen minutes and they’re going to put him in a freezer. How is he supposed to come back if he’s frozen?

So Ben tries. He tries so hard, as hard as he’s tried to do anything, either in life or in death. He stands between the morgue workers and the table, a guard between his brother’s body and the reaching fingers of permanent death, his voice rising, but he’s never been more invisible than he is right now and it makes no difference. They tag Klaus, cover him in a sheet, and in he goes—to await the autopsy that Luther is probably championing.

He’s right, as he always is. He wishes he didn’t know his siblings as well as he does, even thirteen years after his own demise. It was Luther who gave the go-ahead—as the last remaining member of the Umbrella Academy and heir of the Hargreeves name, Luther has final say in what happens to Klaus’s body, seeing as Klaus never bothered to change the paperwork. He never really had anybody else to change it to, no names to put down as next of kin. 

Ben tries to fight that, too. He sees his siblings’ grave faces in the hallway, mid-argument, having just dropped Vanya off upstairs to be looked at. Ben stands among them and tries his damnedest to be heard. He yells at them to give it time, to let Klaus out and wait a moment, to just _wait, damnit_ , but of course, it does no good. Luther is resolute, his voice low and gentle as he explains how they need to know if Klaus was using when he died, if that contributed to his death.

Ben snorts, at the same moment as Five rolls his eyes. “He was shot, idiot. I think that’s cause enough,” Five says, echoing Ben’s thoughts. Diego has paced away, his face red, madder than Ben has seen him in a good long while. He paces back a moment later, getting right up into Luther’s face.

“Our brother just died,” he says, voice like venom, “and you w-want to find a way to blame him for his own d-d-death?”

“No, of course not!” Luther says, aghast. “He just—he was obviously high, he shouldn’t have been there!”

Ben bristles. “Did you forget what happened at the rave?” he demands, getting into Luther’s face as well. Luther’s eyes look right through him, but there’s answer enough—of course he did. Luther, the brother that Ben once looked up to, who Ben _idolized_ growing up, has no idea that Klaus died, sober and hurting, not three days ago.

Ben rolls his eyes in disgust, pacing away. “Typical,” he mutters. He’s just—just so incredibly pissed right now that he’s arguing with his siblings even though no one can even hear him. _Because that_ _’s what you do when you’re a Hargreeves_ , he thinks bitterly.

It’s downhill from there. There’s a moment when Allison starts scribbling on her notepad, a veritable block of stark black text, and Ben has a spark of hope… but then Luther shuts her down, as gently as he ever does. He wants an autopsy. So an autopsy they get.

***

Ben has seen guts. He’s seen gore. He’s even watched autopsies before, back when Hargreeves thought he could work hard and develop fine motor control of the Horrors. He used to watch them with his stomach churning, the Horrors pushing at that spot inside of him like eager puppies.

_It_ _’s no different_ , he tells himself, as he stands at Klaus’s head. But of course it’s different, watching a body with the face of his brother get cut open. 

At least he can’t vomit anymore. Perks of being a ghost.

The autopsy is complete by sunrise, a speedy operation due to the late Reginald Hargreeves’ political and monetary influence. Dear old Dad granted so much money to the hospital that the place is all but named after him. It’s suffocating. Or it would be, if Ben breathed anymore.

The autopsy shows that Klaus was clean when he died. Because he was. Ben knew he was, and Luther should have known, too. Ben wishes, desperately, that he could throw that in Luther’s face. 

He settles instead for sitting at Klaus’s side all the way to the funeral home, so that Klaus isn’t alone when he’s prepared for burial. Even though Klaus isn’t really here anymore. It’s just a body with a familiar face. It’s been nine hours, a freezer, and an autopsy—Klaus isn’t coming back.

It’s strange, grief. As a living person, yes, but especially as a ghost. Ben knows grief, but only because he experienced it in life. If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t be able to connect the dots and really truly feel Klaus’s loss. But he did, thankfully or not. He felt it every day for years, after he finally accepted that Five was gone and he wasn’t coming back, and thus he feels it now—or at least the echoes of it. Everything is just so detached from him as a ghost. Every once in a while he’ll get a really strong emotion that seems to ring in his head like it’s an echo chamber—Klaus calls it going poltergeist ( _used_ to call it going poltergeist)—but other than that it’s just numbness, round the clock, with flickers of things here and there.

Ben almost wishes he’d go poltergeist now. Klaus attracted ghosts when his powers were active, which was any time his body started to detox, so Ben has seen his fair share of them. There are different classes of ghosts, see—ones like Ben, who are as they were in life, if not a little blander… but there are also the poltergeists, the screamers, the corpses, those who ruminate on their deaths to the exclusion of all else, so far gone in death that they turn obsessive, getting angry or sad or vengeful until it consumes them, overriding everything else that was once human about them.

The good news was that they would usually calm when Klaus talked to them, when they realized that someone alive could see them, their pain, and help them. The bad news, well… the bad news was that if Klaus didn’t do as they asked they only got worse, wailing at the tops of their spectral lungs and crowding all around him, cold hands clawing for him until he was a crying mess.

Ben had only seen it happen once or twice, but it was clear that Klaus hated them, and why. He’d literally rather drug himself into oblivion than talk to the corpses that hung around. Really, it was no wonder. Ben was grateful that he wasn’t one of them, bearing his fatal wounds and screaming for all eternity. But now, when there is no one to hear him anyway, he’s beginning to wonder if it even matters.

He doesn’t know. All he knows is that two days after Klaus dies, the funeral comes. They always were quick with the turnaround, their family. Efficiency—it was Reggie’s bread and butter. Ben can’t even remember how many times he got told off for not making his kills efficient enough.

It doesn’t matter now. Not as they go to the cemetery nearest the collapsed Academy for the ceremony. Ben would have preferred Klaus to be buried beside him, in the plot on the Academy grounds, but the whole place is currently a hazard zone (and also a crime scene, technically) so they’ve settled for what they can get.

It’s… tasteful. The ceremony. It’s for Klaus, yes, but also Pogo and Mom, because Diego refused to let her go a second time without saying some words about her. Pogo was dug out the day before, but she’s still in the rubble. Still, the sentiment is there, as are all the siblings but Vanya, who is still unconscious. They’re in all black for the second time in two weeks, standing around the casket that was ordered to Reggie’s specifications. Because Luther was in charge of it, and of course he did exactly what Dad said. He’s mad at their father after everything, but it’s still ingrained in him to follow orders, so of course he did. But he also ordered cucumber sandwiches, and little crystal glasses of high-quality brandy, having taken Klaus’s complaints at the last funeral to heart, so… at least there's that.

They start at eleven in the morning, taking turns making little speeches until it’s long past noon. Telling stories about when they were kids. Talking about how colorful and flamboyant Klaus was, how he brought spice to their lives, how he’d barge in and turn everything upside down even when they least wanted it. Especially when they least wanted it. And Klaus… god, Klaus would have fucking _reveled in it_. If only he were here, he’d get a goddamn _kick_ out of his own funeral. He always was a morbid kind of guy, making inappropriate jokes and flaunting his gallows humor—he got the Hello/Goodbye tattoo idea from a ouiji board, for god’s sake—and Ben… fuck. He misses his _brother_ , damnit.

At least his siblings keep it together. No one gets drunk and unruly, no one busts out an inappropriate speech or starts slinging blame around, like every other funeral this family has ever had. No, they save that for afterward, when they get to the hotel they’re staying at and it all comes bursting out after one misplaced word. 

Ben watches them all devolve into children, as they throw barbs around, the caustic sting of sarcasm dripping down from quivering lips. And then, because they’re healing or because they’ve had enough or just because they’re all that broken, they make amends. Allison and Luther hug and Five collapses into a chair with a bottle of vodka and Diego sets off for his own place, the funeral black of his clothes indistinguishable from the leather get-up he normally wears.

And Ben? Ben, who has no one he can turn to and make faces with while everyone else argues, who cannot be seen or heard or touched, who has lost his only link to the living world and knows that it’s not coming back this time? Well, it doesn’t really matter. There’s nothing stopping him from seeking out the light, now. If he stays or if he goes, no one will know. No one except him.

…He stays.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 


	2. EOT = αM − α

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A little look into Five's life since Klaus's death.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We'll get to Klaus in the next chapter, don't you worry! Also if you want extra progress updates or if you want to ask questions feel free to go to the-ghost-of-william-herondale.com. 
> 
> Special thanks to @schizoidwire on tumblr for reading the chapters I've been finishing to make sure everything makes sense!

If there’s one moment that Five knows that all is lost and that his brother is as good as dead, it’s when he arrives at the hotel where he met the Handler what feels like just moments before only to find her lying in bed with a gunshot wound to the head.

Useless.

He knows the work, can see Hazel all over it. He searches the room all the same, just in case he’s wrong, but he’s never wrong and the briefcase is long gone.

_Useless_.

So Klaus dies, and is buried. In an iron casket, no less. Something something Dad being a paranoid bastard, probably assuming that a ghost would enter Klaus’s empty body and walk around in it if they weren’t careful.

Useless, useless, _useless, useless, USELESS—_

Fuck. Five grits his teeth. That thought, it’s like a marble, just rattling around in his head. Ever time it hits his skull it’s a reminder of how close he was to his goal, how it was right there, right within his grasp… and then slipped away again just like that. Because of course saving the world couldn’t be a victory. Not when he was so utterly goddamn _useless_ at the end.

Five groans, dragging a hand down his face. 

It’s been a long couple of weeks. 

_At least_ , he thinks, _I made it back in time_. To good old 2019, where they have electricity and buildings and human people walking around instead of corpse after corpse after corpse. There’s only one corpse this time around. Just the one. 

Klaus. The second brother that Five has failed.

He leans back, letting the beep of the heart monitor remind him again and again of the fact that the world is intact. It could be worse, he has to remind himself of that. Really, four out of six isn’t bad, is it? He couldn’t save Ben and he couldn’t save Klaus, but… the others. That has to mean something. Sixty-six point six seven percent is—is—

—it’s no use, is what it is. He’s been over the numbers so many times. They never add up to anything but a vast, abysmal failure. Even figuring in the billions of people who survived, ninety-nine point nine nine percent of the human population surviving to live another day, it’s still a failure.

Five should have saved him. 

That’s that on that.

With a sigh, Five blinks around the room, daring his eyes to tear up. His gaze wanders over Vanya’s pale form, her shock-white hair and pallid face, the blue of the sheets that seems just a touch paler than it did when she was first admitted two days ago. She is as motionless as ever. Like Dolores, perched on the chair beside him, like the blank blue sky outside the window. He blinks again. Not now, not _now_. He’s shed his tears for his siblings already, forty-five years past. He won’t do it again. Instead he reaches out a hand to straighten Dolores’s shirt on her slim shoulder.

She hasn’t spoken to him since Klaus’s death. He suspects she knows his guilt.

“Mr. Five? There’s a call for you.”

Five turns to the doorway to see one of the nurses standing there, a pinch to her face. Because of course there is. Five hasn’t left at all in the past two days, and he’s been informed by more than one person that his mannerisms are ‘abrasive’ and ‘need some work’. Just yesterday, _Diego_ of all people told him off for calling the doctors idiots. What was he supposed to do, though? The doctors keep insisting on being ‘realistic’ about Vanya’s condition. She ranked a five on the Glasgow Coma Scale, which is medical speak for being basically unresponsive to all stimuli, a result generally known to mean that ‘realistic’ is ‘don’t get your hopes up’, but the doctors have never dealt with a supernaturally induced coma like this before. They know nothing about what is goddamn ‘realistic’ for this family. They’re talking out of their asses. Idiots.

In any case, there is absolutely no way that Five is going to leave this hospital until his sister regains consciousness. He needs to be here when Vanya wakes, to make sure that she’s okay and that she’s in control of her powers, that she won’t snap again. He needs to make sure that Klaus’s death wasn’t in vain.

…He also needs to take this damn call before his siblings come parading in like the brain-dead clowns they are. Five jumps from the room and snatches the phone off the hook, jabbing the button for line four so he can snap a, “ _What_ , asshole?”

“ _When is the last time you slept_?” Luther asks mildly on the other end of the line.

“I slept for thirteen minutes at three thirty-two this morning,” Five says matter-of-factly. He omits the fact that he’d slid off the hospital chair in an ungainly heap and woken himself up, after which he’d gone to the cafeteria and gotten the largest, most disgusting coffee he’s ever had in his entire goddamn life. The the first of many. He’s still buzzing. It’s irrelevant.

“ _Really_ ,” Luther says, unconvinced.

“Yes,” Five grits out. “Now get to the point before I hang up on you.”

“ _Alright, alright. So_ _… the crime scene investigators just finished with the house. It’s still cordoned off because it’s a hazard zone but it’s no longer got the police tape around it. We’re coming to the hospital to have a family meeting about it. Just… giving you a heads up_.”

For the love of god. “Why do I need to be involved with this? Bury the whole thing in concrete for all I care.”

“ _Uh. Well. Three things. One, we found Grace. She might be salvageable, if we can find her schematics. So we need to discuss—hey, yes, we do need to discuss it! Diego_ —”

Five rolls his eyes as the sound of Diego shouting comes across the line. There’s a bit of a scuffle, and then Luther is back, huffing in annoyance. 

“ _Sorry about that. We need to discuss what to do with her. Which brings me to number two—the house itself can be repaired. You know, if we want to. So_ _… three, we need to talk about who is staying and who isn’t_.”

Right. Five closes his eyes for a long moment. It’s like a weight on his chest, the fact that his siblings are all adults now, even if they are still so young compared to him. He’s been putting it from his mind, forcing himself to stay on task, but he knew in his heart that this day was coming. The fact is that they don’t live at home anymore. They have their own ambitions, their own lives. The chances of them all sticking around were low to begin with, and that was before they lost another. He knows from Vanya’s book that they scattered to the four winds after Ben—he can’t imagine what they’re going to do now.

“Right,” he says, and breathes through the pressure. “I’ll find us a conference room.”

***

They wind up sequestered in the basement, in a storage room that has thick concrete walls, good for keeping all the raised voices and arguments tucked neatly inside so they don’t disturb the patients. Because if there’s one thing that Five knows, it’s that they’re going to argue. 

He sighs around his fourth (fifth?) cup of coffee of the day. They agreed, after some debate, to try and revive Grace. Five will be the one to do it, now that Pogo is gone, again on the assumption that they can find some schematics for her. So that’s fine.

It’s the second issue, the house, that they’ve gotten stuck on. That damn house, always bringing out the worst in them… all their interpersonal conflict has been pushed to the forefront, and words are getting heated.

“Oh, so _now_ you want to pretend it was ‘ _our home_ ’, too?!”

…Case in point. They’re really going at it now—something about the legitimacy of Dad’s last will and testament, Five isn’t paying any particular attention. He wasn’t even in the will, what does he care? More importantly, there’s a cold spot in the room. At first Five figured it was the vent in the corner, but it isn’t consistent enough with airflow currents through the room for that to be the answer. 

Now, look. Five knows a lot of things about a lot of things. But there are a few things that he doesn’t quite understand, Klaus’s powers among them. He doesn’t want to sound crazy, but—

“Five? You’ve been quiet. Anything to add?”

Five blinks and looks up, focusing on his siblings and pushing the cold spot to the back of his mind for future investigation. He needs more data before he makes up some wild theory, anyway. Right now he has siblings to deal with. Like Luther, who is looking at him with a frown on his face, hunched up with his arms crossed as he leans against a wall. Five looks around at the others, at Allison and Diego making disgusted faces at each other across the room. 

Clearly, they haven’t come to any sort of consensus.

Five rolls his eyes. He then opens his mouth, and he means to make a sarcastic remark about how annoying the lot of them are, really he does, but instead what comes out is, “…I’ve missed you guys.”

That pulls everyone up short.

“Wh—are you okay?” Diego asks, as Allison reaches a maternal hand out to temperature test Five’s forehead. Five snarls, pulling away from her, from both of them. He’s perfectly fine, damnit—it’s just a fact, after all. He _has_ missed his siblings, even the ones who drove him to distraction when they were kids. This is his _family_ , borne of supernatural coincidence and one billionaire’s weird obsession with owning things that probably shouldn’t be owned, and he just—he _just_ —

“Do what you want,” he snaps. “Leave or don’t leave. I can’t control you. I’ve been alone before, and I can do it again.” He takes a deep breath, holds it against the pressure in his chest, and lets it out. “Just… I did. I missed you. That’s all I want to say.”

With that, he pulls forth the energy that pulses at his core, coalescing it in his hands and shaping it with his mind until with a flash of blue light he jumps from the room. He only goes as far as the other side of the door, where he leans heavily against the wall, feeling all the tons of exhaustion that have weighed him down for the last four and a half decades resting on his shoulders. 

There’s silence inside for a long moment, after that. Allison, Diego, and even Luther are quiet, presumably sitting in the awkward, charged silence that he left behind. Then, Diego speaks up.

“I’m not giving up my place,” he says. “…But. If we rebuilt the house… I would stop by every once in a while.”

“Yeah, I… I want to get out, I think. But it should be there. For all of us to come back to, you know?” Luther says.

Allison scribbles on her notepad, and Luther hums as he reads it. “Yeah, and we should stick close until Vanya wakes up, agreed,” he says. 

“So who’s in favor of rebuilding?” Diego says. “Everyone?”

“I’m in,” Luther says.

Another pause.

“Allison’s in,” Luther says. “Diego?”

“Yeah. Place deserved to be leveled, but I’m not opposed to building something new.”

“Then it’s settled. Home base is a go. Let’s do this.”

A short moment of silence, and then there’s the sound of them slapping each others’ hands, high fives all around, as if in the memory of the brother they so recently lost. 

Five stands, head bowed and eyes closed, for a moment longer. Then he exhales the breath he was holding, turns, and jumps back upstairs.

He’s just in time. He’s barely settled down with his coffee in his hand when Vanya twitches, her nose wrinkling, before she suddenly shoots up ramrod straight, chest heaving, brown eyes wet and impossibly wide.

“Dad—” she says, the word dying on her lips. “Don’t… don’t…”

Five studies her, a crease between his brows. “Dreaming of something?” he asks.

She twitches, turning her eyes on Five. “I… I don’t really… remember,” she says. Then: “Who are you?”

***

“Wait, so… amnesia?”

“Yes.”

“But I remember how to talk.”

“Yes.”

“And you are…”

“Your brother.”

“But I don’t remember you.”

“No.”

“And we look nothing alike.”

“This is true.”

“And you say I have powers…”

“Correct.”

“…But that’s crazy.”

“Trust me, it’s not.”

“Just… how do I know you’re telling the truth?”

Shifting where he sits, Five leans forward, baring his teeth in a smile. “Because you know that saying? That truth is stranger than fiction? Well, in our case that is literally just the tip of the iceberg.”

…Vanya stares. Five stares back. 

This is, all things considered, going about as well as a talk with the sister who has cataclysmic sound-manipulation powers that she didn’t know about until literally this week, powers that are strong enough to end all life on earth, could realistically be expected to go.

Five hums, breaking the awkward staring contest and raising his cup to his lips. Ah, empty. He sighs, lowering it again. Then he fixes his sister with a look, taking her in from her hair—still an icy white—to her toes—wrapped up in thin blue hospital socks.

She’s powerful. The most powerful of any of them, as far as he can tell. She has the ability to take the moon down from the sky if she so chose. And still… at the very end… when the commission agents were pouring in… she protected them. So…

…Screw it. Screw everything. Five isn’t going to lose another sibling. They are going to find a way to help Vanya, to fix her, or so help him _god_.

…Which means that they need to find a way to get the commission off their tail.

“So are there… are there more of us? More siblings?” Vanya asks tentatively, drawing him from his racing thoughts.

Five nods. “These days there are five total. I would introduce you to our siblings, but they’re… well, they’re a lot, and we have something we need to do first.”

“We do? What is it?”

“We need to send an ultimatum to a group of terrorists who operate under the name The Temps Commission, who have been using you as a pawn to bring about the end of the world.”

Vanya nods faintly. “Oh.”

Satisfied that she’s sufficiently in the loop, Five jumps from the room to the nurse’s station, snatches up a pen and paper, and jumps back. They’ll have to bluff a little, but while the Commission knows just about everything there is to know, it’s not _quite_ omniscient. There should be juuust enough wriggle room to get the Commission off their asses for the foreseeable future… if they play their cards right.

“Here,” he says, handing the writing implements over to a startled Vanya. “If we want to stay safe, we need to make it clear to the Commission that we are no longer their playthings.”

Vanya takes the pen tentatively, testing it in each hand before deciding on her right. She brings the tip to the paper, and then…

“Wait, what do I tell them?”

Five twitches. This memory thing is starting to annoy him. “Just—threaten them. Be creative,” he says.

Still Vanya hesitates. “But… how?” she asks.

Five groans. “Tell them that I’ll transport you to nineteen fifty-five to blow the place up if they don’t cooperate.”

“You can do that?”

“No, but they don’t have to know that, now do they?” Five says through his teeth.

Vanya nods, biting her lip and looking down. Five waits for her to write something, anything, but after a long, painful moment she drops the pen again and goes, “Are you sure we have to do this?”

For the love of—

“ _Yes_. They’re threatening our lives, not to mention the lives of everyone on the planet, Vanya.”

Vanya stares, eyes huge, and then shakes her head. “I don’t understand. Who’s threatening us?”

“The _Commission_.”

“Oh. Right. So… why didn’t they attack while I was unconscious? Like, to take care of you guys while I couldn’t fight back?”

The thought has occurred to Five, as well. He rubs at the headache beginning to worm in between his eyes. “…I have two guesses. Either they think that the apocalypse is secured for a future date, or the threats we make now worked retroactively.”

“How likely is that? Either of those?”

“Not sure, but we’re about to find out, so get writing.”

“…What am I writing again?”

Five groans. Then, taking a deep breath, he begins to dictate a threatening bluff for her to write down.

“How do you send this to the fifties?” Vanya asks afterward, handing it over. 

Five smiles a grim smile. “I don’t,” he says. He turns to Dolores, telling her that she should keep Vanya company for a bit. He then jumps away, nose to the ground like a bloodhound, looking for—ah. Right… fucking… _there_.

***

The Commission Agent that was on the ground for quick deployment, watching them and waiting for the go ahead, is none too happy to send a message back to headquarters for Five. Not until Five takes off a few fingers, anyway. Then it’s all ‘yes sir, Number Five sir’ and ‘how quickly would you like this done, sir’. Five nods approvingly, shoving away from the bloody mess after the message has been sent. That ought to do it—either the Commission leaves them alone or they find a way to raze the entire organization to the goddamn ground.

“If I ever see your face again I will do the same thing to you that I did on the London job, have I made myself clear?” Five asks, as the agent stares with haunted eyes. A quick, pathetic nod and Five is on his way. 

Not bad for a day’s work.

A moment later he’s back in the hotel room, popping up just outside the bathroom. Luther lets out a grunt and a knife narrowly misses his head but he takes no mind, pushing into the bathroom now that he knows it’s empty. He picks up a washcloth and runs it under warm water, beginning to scrub at his face.

Luther leans in the doorway, Diego at his side and Allison behind them. “Do you have anything you want to tell us?” he asks.

“Vanya woke up,” Five says, scrubbing harder when he finds a chunk in his hair.

“I meant—what did you—did you _kill her_?” Luther asks, aghast, as Allison begins to scribble wildly on her notepad.

Five rolls his eyes. Siblings. Always with the wrong idea. “No, idiot. I was taking care of a Commission Agent.”

Diego waits a moment. “And?” he asks, annoyed.

“And theoretically we’re safe now.” Five tosses aside the washcloth and jumps past the three of them, heading toward the door and the car keys waiting beside it. He cannot deal with bloody clothes right now—he needs something new to wear.

Unfortunately, he doesn’t make it to the car before Allison is there, shoving her notepad in his face.

_How is she???_ it says, underlined four times.

“Blank,” Five says, and sticks around just long enough to hear his brothers go “ _Blank_?” in unison before he’s out, taking the driver’s seat of the car.

The trip to the nearest thrift shop is a short, tedious one. The shopkeeper insists on babying him, a frustratingly frequent occurrence that he cannot seem to avoid. “All that fake blood,” she says with a tut and a plastic smile. “Must have been a wild April Fool’s prank, hm?”

Five bares his teeth back. “Oh, it was a _blast_ ,” he says.

He gets out soon after that, trussed up in a suit a size or two too large. It’s not ideal, but it’ll do, at least for now. The fact that it isn’t that goddamn uniform is a major point in its favor, that much he’ll admit. He spent months in that uniform in the apocalypse, outgrowing it in slow spurts, always on the lookout for clothes that hadn’t been decimated by the end of times—ugh. Not fun.

When he gets back to the hotel room, he finds Luther there alone, talking over the phone to Dad’s private construction team. Good old Reggie was always very strict about keeping up appearances, and he had that team waiting in the wings at all times as they were growing up, ready to patch the house back together at a moment’s notice. A necessity when you had a toddler with super strength and another with an eldritch monstrosity in their stomach.

“Yeah, so… can you fix it?” Luther asks. He waits a moment. He hums. Hums again. “And that’ll cost…? Oh, understood. That’s no problem. Yes. Yes. How long…? Okay, then that’s settled. Thank you very much.”

“For the house, I presume?” Five says, going straight to the coffeemaker in the corner.

Luther nods. “We’re rebuilding, we’ve decided. Just as a home base sort of thing. And listen, what you said—”

“Don’t,” Five says, and breathes out. 

Luther studies him for a long moment. Five wonders what he sees. Does he see an old man who isn’t ready to talk about the decades he spend utterly alone in a post-apocalyptic hellscape? Does he see an accomplished assassin who would regret every day of that life if it hadn’t been a necessary evil? Does he see the young, naive kid who ran away from home because daddy wouldn’t give him what he wanted? Does he see some mixture of all three?

Does he know, as implicitly that Five knows, the guilt Five carries?

…It’s unclear. What Luther knows or doesn’t know… what he thinks of it all… Five may never know. All he knows is that Luther is smart enough to leave it be. He just nods, and looks away, and that is that.

***

They get to take Vanya to their newly reconstructed home three days later, after a battery of tests that reveal that she has no sign of head trauma, bleeding, swelling, seizures, tumors, scar tissue, or anything else that might cause amnesia. 

“It may be psychosomatic,” the doctor says, frowning over some scans. “That means—”

“I know what it means,” Five snaps. He’s so tired of these idiots, good _lord_. The doctor frowns at him, annoyed, but the feeling is mutual and Five doesn’t have it in himself to care. He just wants to get his sister out of this place, to start exploring her powers and figuring out how to help her control them. If they can also figure out _why_ she refuses to remember what happened, that would be _fantastic_.

“You’re very into this whole powers thing,” Vanya says, later that day, as they sit out in the courtyard in the gazebo across from Ben’s statue. She has her white hair tied back in a low ponytail, looking over at Five. 

Five huffs, a little out of breath. They’re practicing together—Five is slowly building up his jump tolerance to what it was when he was an adult so that he can begin working on time travel jumps again, and Vanya is focusing on sounds, working on differentiating them and drawing out individual ones from the bunch. Allison is on the bench by the door, practicing her sign, and Luther and Diego are off to one side, Diego in a tank top and Luther in a turtleneck, throwing casual punches back and forth. Dolores is propped up on the statue’s base, watching over them all.

Just a normal sort of day for the Hargreeves’ family. Well… as normal as they get these days.

It’s… frustrating, if Five is being honest. He used to have a purpose, and he still does, but there used to be a _challenge_ to his days. At the Commission he’d have to figure out how to eliminate his targets without being seen or noticed. It was like solving a riddle, a puzzle, like balancing an equation. And then these last few weeks, after jumping back to twenty-nineteen… it’s been a veritable _whirlwind_ of leads and activity and distractions, all in pursuit of something that he’s been razor-focused on for close to half a century. It was exhilarating, it was terrifying. There were ups and downs and loop-arounds, an entire roller coaster of shit crammed into less than a month’s time. But now? Now that the apocalypse has been averted? God.

He almost wishes there was some other major threat to human-kind just so he wouldn’t feel so _bored_.

_Addicted to the apocalypse_ , his brain pipes up. He grunts, and reaches for his powers once again. He doesn’t bother giving that thought a response, just as he doesn’t bother giving one to Vanya. Of course he’s ‘into’ their powers—they have the ability to change the world in earth-shattering (literally) ways. That’s _important_.

Vanya hums, distracted from practice. She seems to have something on her mind. A moment later Five learns what it is when she says, “So… you mentioned that there are five of us now. Were there… more?”

The other occupants of the courtyard don’t pause, but Five can feel their attention all the same. He sighs. “Yes,” he says. “Two more.”

“And they’re…?”

“Dead,” Five says shortly.

“Oh,” Vanya says, and pulls back just a little. 

For a moment everything is silent except the low rattle of tree branches in the breeze and fists smacking flesh. Then Five sighs, turning more fully toward his sister. “One died when you were sixteen. The other was… more recent. His funeral was a few days ago.”

Vanya stares at him, her eyes huge. “Can I ask how he… went?” she asks, and Five sees a flicker of fear on her face, as if she knows or suspects somewhere deep down that it had to do with her.

He’s quick to set that right. “It was the Commission. Agents caught the others while you and I weren’t there, and he got a bullet to the side. He went fast.”

“I see,” she says. And then, because she’s keen, even in this state, and always seems to ask just the wrong (right) questions, she says, “And you think he would have blamed you?”

Five teleports to a stand, beginning to pace back and forth just as a particularly cold bit of wind whips past. If it were anyone else who had asked, he’d be long gone by now—but Vanya, little Vanya, who was always shunned as a child and who knew long into adulthood that she was worth nothing, not to the man who raised her and not to the world around her… god. He can’t just brush her off.

Still, he doesn’t know exactly what to say. The words are hard. He tries, anyway. “It’s not—he wasn’t the kind of—he just, he wouldn’t have blamed me. That doesn’t mean I couldn’t have stopped it. It’s my fault through inaction.”

Vanya tilts her head. “Then why don’t you do it now? Time travel back and fix it, I mean?”

“Because I’m not—I’m just—I’m not strong enough. Alright? I need to get stronger, to learn how to do things properly without _messing everything up_.”

For a long moment Vanya is silent. Their brothers have stopped their mock-fighting, too still and too silent to not be listening. Allison isn’t pretending she’s not—her eyes are focused right on them from across the way, ready to intervene.

Then Vanya nods, and her gentle hand takes Five’s fist. “Okay,” she says. “That’s okay. Let’s keep going.”

Five nods, and he sits back down. Then he pulls his power forward, holding it at the ready, pushing and pushing and pushing because he’s finally said it out loud—he’s finally admitted the guilt in his chest and on his shoulders, finally put it out into the air, spoken it into the universe, and he’s determined—he will save his brother, both of his brothers, if it’s the last thing he does.

***

He sits up late that night, exhausted, with a fresh cup of coffee at his side and Grace’s schematics on the table before him. The first notice of an impending lawsuit arrived just after lunch, something about the occupants of a car that Vanya overturned during her rampage on her way to the Icarus Theater now pressing charges and suing for personal injury and property damage. Five has a feeling that more will be incoming soon. Unfortunate, really, seeing as they’re trying to avoid stressing Vanya out worse than she already is with the amnesia. And the powers. And the freshly dead brother. 

In any case, Luther is off with their legal council now, trying to find a way to throw daddy’s money at the victims so they don’t have to deal with a long, drawn out legal battle. It’s a prospect that Allison has rightly pointed out is _kinda shitty_ , but what else are they going to do? Throw Vanya to the wolves? As if.

Five sighs. Then he turns to the worktable behind him, looking down at Grace.

She’s a mess, honestly. Without her usual dress, smooth skin on full display… it isn’t pretty. Her chest has caved in, wires spilling out of her neck and one hand gone completely. Her eyes are wide and vacant, completely off with no sign of electrical life behind them, her red lips slack. 

Five has seen her like this once before—in the apocalypse, that was. He tried to fix her then, but it was just about impossible without the infrastructure in place to provide new parts. Now, however…

He clicks his tongue, resolute, and gets to work.

It’s slow going. He’s convinced he can bring her back, but it’ll take some time to do it. He may not be able to bring his brothers back, _yet_ , but Grace? He’ll do it, just you watch. In between practicing jumps and training Vanya, when he’s too exhausted to even think about continuing to use his powers, he sits down with a cup of coffee and works at Grace. He falls asleep at it more than once, head pillowed on her shoulder. He always wakes with a blanket to ward off the cold that seems to follow him around the house, though he never quite figures out who leaves them.

It’s not for lack of trying. He’s made the mistake of brushing off his siblings before, and he’s not about to do it again. The whole ‘Vanya actually has powers’ debacle has taught him that much. He keeps tabs on everyone these days, scribbling down their schedules and pertinent notes in a journal just in case they turn out to be important later. As he does, it becomes harder and harder to not notice that his siblings… they’re… well, they’re struggling.

It’s lowkey, in small ways, but Five knows it from experience. It’s in how Allison comes back from her court-mandated therapy sessions with eyes red, avoiding everyone and going straight to her room. It’s in how Luther is slowly distancing himself from the house, reaching out clumsily into the real world in an attempt to finally get out. It’s in how Diego pretends that he doesn’t care, how he shrugs them all off by saying that he has his own job and his own place, why does he really care what the hell they all do? 

It’s in how no one mentions to Vanya that her violin, pure white and silent, is sitting in its case in the vault in the basement.

There are, of course, some good things. Five can’t overlook those. Allison, for instance, has convinced Patrick to consider letting Claire come and visit sometime next year. She still can’t talk, and she may never be able to again, but there’s hope that she can still be part of her daughter’s life yet. 

Diego, too, has started going to therapy. It’s harder to tell if it’s doing anything in his case, but he seems to have taken the words of his late lady-friend to heart. He can’t keep going the way he’s going.

Luther, on the other hand… Five doesn’t know what to do with Luther. It’s very clear that he doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing. He’s like a teenager, leaving the house for college for the first time. He’s searching for meaning, for something worthwhile to do… and he’s found it in _boxing_ of all things. He apparently got an offer once from Diego’s boss to train him as a fighter, and he’s now taken the man up on it, doing his best to bulk up even more than he already is and getting paid to trade punches with a bunch of sweaty guys.

He gets an offer to play in rigged games from a man who Five knows for a fact has local mafia connections, and he actually considers taking it before Allison manages to get it through his head exactly how _nuts_ that is.

<Are you _kidding me_?> she signs over the dinner table, after he breaks the news. 

Luther opens his mouth as if to argue, takes a moment to think about it, and then says, “Yeah, you’re right, I should probably… not do that.”

< _Thank_ you> Allison signs, and that’s that. No more bad ideas.

…Well. Except for one.

***

It happens nine days after the apocalypse should have been. Five doesn’t know what brings it on, exactly—he’s taking a rare moment to himself, preparing some dolmades to eat, when it starts.

He’s just reaching for the lemon juice on the counter when suddenly the temperature drops ten degrees. It’s like he stepped into a refrigerator, and he shivers, glancing around. There’s no sign of what caused the draft—no sign of any of his siblings, either. Not strange, seeing as Luther and Diego are at the gym and Allison is at therapy. Vanya is—well, last he saw she was upstairs in her room.

He pauses, listening. There’s a sound—the elevator. And not just any elevator—that’s the elevator down to the vault. It’s nearly at the bottom.

“ _Shit_ ,” Five says, and dives away from the stove and directly into a jump.

He appears in the hallway leading to the vault room just as the elevator doors open and Vanya steps out. She’s ghostly pale, shivering, her eyes huge in her face. Her clothes—what was once a gray sweater three sizes too large and a pair of loose jeans—are pure white. Her bare feet leave white footprints wherever she steps, her fingers leaving similar white streaks on the wall as she takes in the hallway, hand braced against the wall. “It’s so itchy,” she says, her voice thin. 

Five stand in front of her, hands up and pleading, not quite daring to touch her. “Vanya,” he says, “can you hear me?”

“I can… I can hear you,” she says, and he breathes out a sigh of relief before she takes a step forward.

He steps with her, staying in front of her. “I need you to go back upstairs,” he says.

She shakes her head. “I… I… have to…”

“You don’t have to do anything. Vanya, do you understand me? You don’t have to do this to yourself.”

“What is this place? Why does it… everything is so _itchy_.”

“This is a place that shouldn’t exist,” Five says, cursing the fact that the construction crew returned the house to exactly it’s former glory. God, he should have gotten them to seal this place off, should have filled it all with concrete, _why the heck didn_ _’t he make it so she’d never have to come back here_ —?

…But he knows the answer. The answer is that it was always her choice. 

She steps again, and she’s barely a foot and a half away from him now. Five shivers as he feels the cold spot between them, positioned right at her front as if trying to stop her. It isn’t working, she’s still moving—and Five knows that he isn’t going to be able to stop her, not if she really wants to go.

“I just… I need to…” she says.

“…Are you sure?” Five breathes.

She nods, her white hair parted around her face. Five swallows, and then… slowly… he reaches out to take her hand.

Together, the two of them step into the vault room.

***

“She _what_?” Diego demands.

“Keep your _voice_ down,” Five snaps. “And for the love of god, stop _crowding_ her.” He’s in the process of wrapping a second blanket around Vanya’s shivering shoulders, and he really doesn’t have the patience for Diego’s tone, not after the day they’ve had.

Diego throws up his hands, but he takes a step back all the same.

Their little field trip into the vault went… well, it went, that’s for sure. It basically served to dredge up some of Vanya’s memories. Not all of them, as far as Five can tell—just a few from their childhood, mostly formative memories. Memories from before she was rumored to think she was ordinary.

She hasn’t stopped shaking since.

Allison hums, rubbing her shoulders. Five has Luther on tea duty—he’s off in the kitchen trying to warm water. Which just leaves Diego, being a pain in Five’s ass.

Case in point. Five sighs as Diego takes him by the elbow leading him to the far side of the sitting room.

“ _What_ ,” Five snaps.

Diego frowns, a constipated look on his face. “What do you mean, ‘what’? The cops have been asking questions, sniffing around. They found a body that led back to Harold Jenkins the other day. They’re going to figure out that she was involved with this shit sooner or later. We need to know if she willingly went with that bastard on this end-of-the-world bender.”

“And if she did? What then, huh?”

“Then she needs to own up to her actions!”

“And if she _didn_ _’t_?”

Diego grunts, turning away for a moment as if asking for patience. 

“Well?” Five demands.

“Look, I don’t know!” Diego bursts out. “It’s a shitty situation! She still hurt a bunch of people! Klaus is dead because of her! Am I just supposed to forgive her for that?! _Huh_?!”

“No,” Five says, and takes a very deep, very deliberate breath that he slowly lets out. “But she’s family. We can’t lose anyone else. _I_ can’t lose anyone else. Can we at least agree on that?”

Diego purses his lips, looking like he’s about to argue. Five expects him to, really he does, but maybe therapy is starting to pay off after all because after a long moment he just nods, terse. “I’ll try and keep the cops off of us,” he says, and sets off in a huff.

Five sighs. Then he wanders across the room to where Luther is serving Vanya a cup of tea. Allison is writing on her notepad— _I_ _’m going to take her upstairs soon_ , it says. Five nods. She needs the rest.

“Stay with her tonight, would you?” he says. 

Allison tilts her head in a question.

Five clicks his tongue. “Nothing. There’s just something I need to do.”

***

An hour later, Five stands alone in his room, looking around at the blank bare walls. He hasn’t really had a chance to dig into anything recently, no equations at the forefront of his mind. He wants to time travel still, yes, but he’s beginning to think it might be more of an instinctual thing than a calculated move, something that he’s never been good with. Right now, however, he has other things that require his attention.

Like the cold spot that followed him into the room.

Now, _look_. Back at the bowling alley, when Klaus was talking about Ben, Five had been annoyed. He thought it was just another random thing that Klaus blurted out for attention. But now… thinking back… he just… he has this _feeling_ that Klaus wasn’t lying.

And maybe Five is crazy. People have said so often enough, going on and on with great gusto about how he’s lost his mind. Maybe he’s finally lost all the rest of his goddamn marbles. But if he’s right… if he’s _right_ …

…then they aren’t as short on siblings as he previously thought.

First things first. Five plops down on the edge of the bed, and holds up both hands, one on either side. “I know you’re there,” he says. “If you are who I think you are… touch my right hand.”

For a moment nothing happens. Nothing moves. And then the cold touches the fingers on Five’s right hand, raising goosebumps up his arm.

_Ah_ , he thinks. _So it can understand me_.

…But is it really Ben?

“Do you know morse code? Right hand for yes, left hand for no,” Five says.

A hesitation, and then the cold moves to his left hand. Five sighs. That alone doesn’t tell him anything—Ben was never very good with their code training. Would have made this easier, though. “Twenty questions it is,” Five says, and frowns, pursing his lips. He has to think this through carefully. How does he narrow it down? What questions does he ask? He can only utilize yes or no answers, which makes this a bit more difficult than it would be otherwise, but he’ll figure it out. He just has to _think_ of something.

He has it a moment later. He clears his throat. “You learned four languages as a child. Right hand for yes, left hand for no.”

The cold moves away and comes back, still on the left. Then Five jumps as it touches his chest, tapping six times. He breathes out. “Correct, we learned the basics of six each,” he says, impressed. “…But you could have learned that in any number of documentaries created about us. Let’s try another one. When we were eleven, you asked for my help with the quadratic equation. Right yes, left no.”

This time the cold pulls back. Five waits, but it doesn’t come forward with an answer. He rolls his eyes, muttering under his breath a moment about how he’s asking a ghost to hold his hands, then:

“If you don’t know the answer, touch both my hands.”

The cold touches both of his hands at once. Five nods. “Fair enough,” he says. He frowns, digging deeper. He has an exceptional memory, but it’s been nearly fifty years since he last saw Ben—it’s hard to come up with easily answerable questions that only the two of them might now.

But he manages. He asks about training and Dad and times they hung out alone together, throwing in a few trick questions as he goes, until he’s reasonably sure that he’s actually talking to who he thinks he is.

It’s then, and only then, that Five swallows and asks, “If you are Ben… don’t you know that Klaus is gone?”

Right, yes.

“Then why are you still here?”

And the cold reaches forward, and it touches both his hands, and Five feels the pressure inside him growing unbearable. Ben doesn’t know. Even if he did, he couldn’t answer. He’s just a ghost now, after all. 

“Fuck,” Five says, yanking his hands back and planting one over his eyes. He swallows hard, and again, reminding himself that he’s done this already, he’s already cried for them don’t you dare, don’t you _dare do it again_ —

If he breaks that promise to himself, right here and right now, well… only a ghost will ever know.

He’s exhausted afterward. He wants nothing more than to fall backward into his bed and sleep for the next century. But he has jumps to practice, Grace to fix, Vanya to check on—he has things to do. So instead of crawling into bed, he stands up, ready to get another cup of coffee. 

Except… before he jumps, a cold hand touches his shoulder, getting his attention.

Five shakes himself. “All right, another round of twenty-questions,” he says. “You’re thinking of… a place. Yes or no.”

Instead of answering, the cold rises until it touches Five’s face. It’s startling, but there is a gentleness there, as if a ghostly hand were resting over his eyes. Five closes them, biting his lip. The intent is clear—Ben wants him to rest. But he can’t, he just—he _can_ _’t_. But the ghost is persistent, and after a long impasse Five sighs and nods.

“Okay,” he says. “Okay. You’re right. It’s time to sleep.”

And he does.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 


	3. Rude Awakenings

Coming back from the dead is a grueling experience. Trust Klaus, he would know. He’s what you might call an expert in the whole pulling-a-jesus thing, and the truth? Is that there are rude awakenings, and then there are _rude awakenings_. Reanimation… whoo boy. That is _definitely_ in the latter category. 

He’s not even sure what happened, at first. One moment he’s chatting up God—she’s going to let him see Dave one of these days, damnit—and the next he’s lying in pitch black darkness ( _advanced_ darkness), his fingers tingling with cold and the smell of rot invading his nose, familiar from all those trips to the morgue or to crime scenes or to wherever else the bodies were. Reggie was always so insistent on him seeking out the ghosts of the dead, like they were Easter eggs on an Easter egg hunt and Klaus was crazy for dragging his feet about coming face to face with literal corpses.

Klaus snorts in the darkness. As if Sir Reginald Hargreeves knew what Easter was. Growing up, they trained seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, holidays included. If the man had ever so much as touched a chocolate bunny in his life, Klaus will eat his left sock. And with that, it’s time to get this party started! 

Klaus breathes in—still with the rot smell, _eugh_ , not pleasant—and goes to sit up. 

His first attempt doesn’t get him very far, as he quickly realizes that his core muscles are experiencing a state where they resemble something very similar to jello. He groans aloud. His entire body is weak and shaking, and his side, where he was shot, is achy and stiff. He feels like he went a round with Luther, in all honesty. Not fun, and again, he would know. Resident getting-beat-up-by-Luther-in-the-name-of-training expert, you know.

He breathes in again, pulling himself together. Then, concentrating with all his might, he manages to lever his elbows under his torso and push himself off his back, rising a good few inches—

—before he smacks face-first into something just above him with a very solid _thunk_.

He yelps, collapsing right back down again. What the hell was _that_?! Where did his idiot siblings leave him? Is he under a desk or something? What the hell is going _on_? And where, pray tell, are the damn _lights_?!

Klaus groans again, giving himself a moment to breathe through the pain. His nose better not be broken. If his nose is broken he’s going to be _pissed_. Dying was bad enough, but if he has to deal with a crooked nose, too, he’s going to lose it. Not to be vain or anything, but his nose was his best feature. Dave used to brush a knuckle down that nose when he caught Klaus lost in thought, bringing him back with a laugh. Cutest shit Klaus has ever seen—

_Focus_.

Klaus blinks, squeezing his eyes shut and then opening them as wide as he can. It doesn’t help at all with the sight problem, but it does serve to wake him up a little. _Yes, good_ , he thinks, as a few more of his higher functions come online. Christ, this death was a doozy. _Wakey wakey, Klausey boy_.

Okay. He’s awake. Time to get this thing on the road. First things first: to figure out where he is. 

He decides to do this by flailing out all his limbs, attempting to find an end to the the surface above him. If it’s a desk it’ll have an edge somewhere that should be facing the rest of the room, and then he can go out and find the light switch. Very simple, yes? Yes.

…And yet. He runs almost immediately into a problem, which is that the surface above him not only does not have an edge, but there are also two more surfaces, one on either side of him, that connect to that one. 

He frowns. Where the hell is he, a vent shaft? Except no, vent shafts don’t have caps on the ends. Not like the ones that he finds when he points his toes and pushes his hands above his head. That’s… weird. Did his siblings shove him in a box or—?

The realization hits like a train. He’s not in a box—he’s in a _casket_. One of those fancy ones, with the silk lining. His siblings, bless their hearts, thought he was dead and they freaking _buried him_.

He chokes on a laugh, too high in the tight space. Whoo, boy. A casket. That’s _new_.

Okay, okay, time to be serious. Judging by the smell, he’s been here a couple of weeks already. Or his body has, at any rate. He has no idea what the delay was—in the past he’s always come back around the same day, what gives?—but there must have been something that prevented his consciousness from coming back.

He hums, attempting to reach the bullet hole in his side. His elbow hits the side of the casket, and he rolls his eyes before reaching awkwardly over his body with his other hand, palming at his skin.

Hm. It’s closed over, not fully healed if the ache is anything to go by, but definitely healed enough. Was that what took so long? The wound? Maybe the bullet working its way out of his body? His last gunshot was through and through, with a clean exit wound, so that could definitely explain it. 

God, his siblings think he’s dead. He lets out a giggle. Boy are they in for a surprise. Wonder what they’ll think when Ben tells them they royally fucked up. Or, actually… Klaus frowns. He doesn’t know yet if Ben is visible to other people when he’s solid. They’ve played some patty-cake and he’s started to get the hang of turning Ben corporeal, but ‘corporeal’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘visible’. 

Ah, whatever. Ben can find a pencil to scribble with or something. Klaus just has to conjure him and solidify— _haha_ —a plan. 

Taking a deep, slow breath, Klaus raises both hands in front of his chest and curls them into fists. A _flex_ deep in his mind and they light up with an ethereal blue glow, illuminating the lid of the casket blue, as well. 

Klaus hums, taking a moment to admire the suit they buried him in. It looks like the one that he wore to that place with the snow globe. He has fond memories of that place. Well, not so much fond as awful, painful memories of sitting with Mom afterward as she pulled glass out of his face, but who’s counting? Besides, it’s the suit that matters. Oh, and look—there’s the blood on the shoulder. Definitely the same suit. Nice. Could definitely use some sequins or something, but—

Klaus grunts, shaking himself out of his thoughts. He needs to focus. Where is Ben? He should have been here by now. Not that there’s much room in here for two people, but. Actually screw that, Ben’s a ghost, he could hang out in the dirt and stick his head in or something. Klaus is the one suffering, the least Ben could do is show up, right?

“Come on, bastard! What gives?!” Klaus wheezes, straining.

…Ben still does not appear.

Letting out his breath, Klaus slumps back onto the cushion beneath him. “…I didn’t mean to call you a bastard,” he says, just in case Ben is somewhere nearby listening to him. He didn’t, really. He’s just feeling a tad stressed right now—he doesn’t exactly do well in tight spaces. Or dark spaces. Especially not tight, dark spaces. 

Okay. Second attempt. He raises his fists again, _flexing_ with all his might. 

Still no go. Nothing is working. 

He groans, sweat beading on his face. “Great time for my powers to go on the fritz,” he says aloud. This is ridiculous, he’s not even high. He frowns. Then, for good measure, says, “ _Thanks_ , Dad.” He doesn’t know how it’s Reggie’s fault but he figures it must be, somehow. Dear old Dad has been to blame for ninety-nine percent of Klaus’s problems in life so far, with the other one percent being a mix of the apocalypse and God herself. 

…Actually, that split seems a little uneven, doesn’t it? Yeah, you’re right, it’s definitely uneven. It’s more like ninety-nine point nine nine _nine_ percent Reggie’s fault.

Klaus snorts. Okay, okay, so he’s starting to freak out a little. Lying down flat on his back in a box barely bigger than he is—it’s not great. There are no ghosts in here with him, like there would be at the mausoleum, but it’s still much too dark, much too cold, and the rot… that perpetual smell of _decomposition_ …

…also is it just Klaus or is it getting harder to breathe now?

Klaus blinks, raising blind eyes and looking around wildly as if that will help. It doesn’t. There isn’t a nice, neat little dashboard to look at, no dial to tell him how much oxygen he has left in the cramped little space.

God, there can’t be much. 

He sucks in another breath, too shallow to make much difference in either the oxygen saturation in the casket or the oxygen count in his body. He just—just— _what if he_ _’s running out of air already_? What if he’s already used it all up? And, yes, okay, so he’s done a little bit of breath play and erotic asphyxiation (don’t judge) but it was never in a situation where he thought he’d actually _die_. Just, you know… pass out a little. Black out for a few seconds. Come around to his one night stand having a little freakout in the corner thinking he’d killed a man and that he was going to prison for twenty-to-life. It happens.

…What was he saying?

Oh. Right. The _point, here,_ is that he’s never suffocated to death before. And maybe it’s because he knows what it’s like to pass out from having a bondage rope a little too tight around his throat for a little too long that he feels the thought of dying that way ignite a primal fear deep down in his chest. 

He just—he needs— _he has to get out_.

Head spinning, Klaus jerks his hands up to his chest, fingers so tightly fisted that he can feel the ache in his bones. A flex in his head and his powers start up, pulsing behind his eyes. “Come on, come on, come on—” he says, as the icy blue glow begins to light up, growing brighter and brighter and brighter in the darkness. He bears down on the muscle in his brain, holding it tight, and like an engine his powers rev and rev and rev, wheels spinning in place and smoke rising in great billowing clouds, and still, _still_ nothing happens—

—and his chest is heaving—

—sweat running down his face—

—light beginning to splutter—

—and he just—

—he can’t _do this_ —

—he can’t hold on forever—

—he doesn’t have the strength—

—and if no one comes—

—if no one comes—

— _god_ —

—he knows how little he means to the world—

—how insignificant his life is—

—but he doesn’t want it to end like this—

—god, _not like this_ —

—only it seems like he doesn’t get a choice, he never gets a choice, it’s always the world coming in and taking what it wants from him, putting him into smaller and smaller boxes, first the mausoleum and then that hotel room and now his very own casket, like christ, can’t you just give a guy a _fucking break_ —

— _like for real he_ _’s just asking for one little break_ —

— _before the darkness comes back in_ —

— _please, god_ —

— _just this once_ —

—

—

—

—but of course it doesn’t come.

The light goes out.

He’s all alone, unable to breathe, _trapped_.

Just.

Like.

_That_.

***

Klaus is fine. He didn’t suffocate. Turns out that was a panic attack. So… yeah. Yay?

Klaus wheezes, flat on his back in the darkness. The sweat on his skin is starting to turn cold, and he shivers. His fingernails hurt from where he mindlessly clawed at the silk lining of the casket lid above him. His knuckles, too, from beating against it. And his feet from kicking, and his knees from the bad angle of kicking, and his nose, still, from before, when he whacked it. His side aches worse now, the wound too fresh for the workout he just had. And, now that he’s moved around some, he’s realized that his stomach feels… weird. It’s not a ‘hungry’ kind of weird or a ‘I need to throw up’ kind of weird, just… weird. He doesn’t know what to make of that just yet.

He hums on an exhale, blinking upward. 

The darkness doesn’t so much as blink back.

…You know what? Maybe he is high. He lets out a laugh, one that bubbles up from his chest like icy sludge. This feels like a bad trip if he’s ever had one. Trust him, he would know. He’s the resident expert on bad trips, after all.

You know what the cure for a bad trip is? More drugs.

He shuffles, feeling around in his pockets with shaky hands. “God, they couldn’t have buried me with some schnapps or something? A joint or two, maybe?” he mutters to himself. If he’s ever deserved a hit, he thinks, it’s right now. But nooo, of course his uptight siblings didn’t think to leave him some weed so he could fucking hotbox his casket, because they’re assholes who won’t do the decent thing and send a guy off in style. 

Klaus sighs. Then, as if by chance, his fingers run into something small and smooth in the breast pocket of the suit he’s wearing.

“You’re kidding me,” he says, plucking the lighter from its little home. After everything, all that panicking and overusing his powers and freaking out about the light going out, he had a light source on him _the entire time_?!

…Yes. Of course he did.

He flicks the lighter, blinking sullenly at the scratched up remains of the silk lining above him. Now that he’s not actively losing his fucking mind, he’s come to an awful conclusion. What is this awful conclusion? Thanks for asking! See, the problem is that Klaus is buried alive. So how do you unbury yourself? Simple enough—you dig. Six feet of fresh grave dirt and BAM, there’s the surface, where the living people walk and talk and go about their lives. If he can dig his way out, he’ll be _free_ , baby.

The problem is that he has to get through his casket first. Fun. And he just painted his nails before he died, too.

Klaus sighs, picking at the remains of the silk lining above him. He just has to break through the wood and then he’ll be home free. He can dig himself out, and if he doesn’t, well, he’ll die trying. And then come back. And maybe cry a little bit. And then try again. Because that’s life when you’re Klaus Hargreeves.

…He’s putting it off. _Just do it, Klaus_ , he thinks. _Come on_. 

He breathes slowly out. Then, gritting his teeth, he lets the lighter die, puts it in his mouth for safekeeping, raises both hands, _and_ —

—feels something metal, warm from his body heat, slip down his chest and into his armpit.

“Wait,” he says around the lighter, slapping at his neck until he hooks a finger around the chain and pulls it free of his clothes. The dog tags on it jangle, a merry sound in the dead silence. Klaus swallows, tears pricking at his eyes, as a sudden wave of emotion overtakes him. His siblings actually buried him with Dave’s tags? Did they… did they know how much they meant? Oh, god, they must have. He’s never doubting his siblings again, holy _fuck_ —

With a shaky exhale, Klaus removes the lighter so he can raise the tags to his lips. “Sorry, Davey, but I’m in a bit of a pickle right now,” he whispers to them. “Forgive me for this, will you?”

Then, apologies complete, he raises the tags above his head, presses them against the lid of the casket, and draws them down toward his feet…

…only to wince as the sound of metal screeching against metal sounds in his ears.

“What the…”

He scrapes again, silk coming off in a strip, and again, there’s that _noise_. He blinks. Then he flicks the lighter back on, tapping the tags against the casket lid. Metal on… metal. Not wood. Not something he can break through. He’s hit… fucking… _metal_. Cold, shiny, shimmering _METAL_.

He throws up his hands as far as he can in the tight space. That at least explains why his powers weren’t working, jesus _christ_. His powers _hate_ metal, especially iron. Something about iron and ghosts being incompatible, he doesn’t know, he never paid attention to what Dad used to say about it. The point is that he’s stuck. He can’t dig himself free. There is no _getting out_. He has no way to contact anyone on the outside, no way to get the attention of the living OR the dead, no way to call for help… fuck. If he screams, will they hear him? Through six feet of dirt and an iron encasement? And that’s if there’s anyone up there to _hear him_ , anyway.

God. He can’t—he can’t do it again. He can’t die and go back to God and have to face the prospect of returning to this fucking casket all over again. He just… he _can_ _’t_. He can’t, he can’t, he _can_ _’t_. But what else can he do??

…It’s right about here that he says fuck it and begins to scream.

***

Sometimes, when Klaus is stressed the hell out and the dealer he goes to has shorted him for the second time this week alone and he doesn’t have enough money to stretch the pills as far as he needs them to, he’ll blink and suddenly time will move without him.

There are technical terms for it. People love telling him about them. At rehab, especially. Whoo, boy, those shrinks at the rehab clinics just can’t get _enough_ of him. ‘Avoidance’ and ‘self-medication’ and blah, blah blah, blah blah…

Anyway. Dissociation. That’s the one he’s talking about now. It’s hard to tell, what with the fact that nothing has changed about the casket and also because he has no way to tell what day it is let alone what hour, but he thinks he just did it. Blinked and lost a little bit of time. 

He sighs, stretching out until his shoes hit the footboard and his hands hit the headboard. He’s still mostly okay, physically speaking. He can still breathe. Still got blood moving through his veins. His throat is shredded from overuse and he could really go for some water right about now, but those are small problems, in the scope of things. He’s starting to feel kind of really thirsty, not gonna lie, but all things considered he has a feeling he won’t be in here long enough to dehydrate.

There is one thing that he finds a little odd, though. That’s the fact that he’s still not hungry. Instead of hunger, the weird feeling in his gut has started to evolve into pressure, so that’s… interesting. It’s like there’s something inside of him that isn’t supposed to be there, something taking up space, like he’s been stuffed with cotton.

He’s kind of trying not to think about it, to be completely honest.

Which brings him to his mental state. Because physically he’s okay, but mentally? _Whoo_ , boy.

He purses his lips, running his tongue over the split in his chapped bottom lip from screaming. It’s not just the dark and the cramped space and the rot smell—it’s also the fact that Ben isn’t here. _No one_ is here. This might be the longest he’s ever been without human contact in his entire goddamn life, and it doesn’t feel good. There’s no one to please, no one to joke around for, no one’s concern to brush off and no one to pretend that he’s doing okay to. He’s so used to putting on a brave face, so used to pretending that he’s enjoying the trip or the sex or the banter… like fuck, he’s never lived for himself and it _sucks_ that he has no other choice right now. It’s actually really, really shitty and he kind of feels like crying just because there’s no one here to see.

He doesn’t—gotta conserve that water, bro, who knows when he’ll next get something to drink—but the thought is there all the same. He then makes a valiant attempt to distract himself by brainstorming ways to get out.

He comes up with nothing much, to no one’s surprise.

“Bet God is getting a kick out of this,” he mutters, and then flicks on the lighter once more, trying to keep it away from the strips of silk hanging down. His fingernails are nasty, all torn and bloody and—wait, is one of them still bleeding?

He studies it a moment. Yep, still bleeding. 

Wait… that gives him an idea. 

With painstaking care, he touches the bloody fingertip to the lid of the casket, drawing a line down. He then draws another line down, next to it but with a gap between. And then one across both of them, and another below that, and… perfect.

He thinks carefully for a moment, face scrunched up, before putting an X in the center of the little grid.

Then an O in the upper right.

An X on the left center. 

An O in the bottom right.

An X in the right center, and would you look at that? He’s won!

He cheers, doing a little victory dance—well, more of a victory wriggle—for himself. Nothing beats tic tac toe. It’s the _superior_ pre-mission game. He was the reigning champion when they were kids and—

—ah, fuck, the lighter just caught one of the pieces of silk.

With a yelp Klaus lets the lighter die, smacking the new flame before it can spread and light his hair on fire. It takes a moment before it’s out. He inhales, wincing. Ah. Rot AND smoke. An interesting combination, he must say. Definitely not one that he’d buy if he smelled it in a candle store, though.

“…Mistakes were made,” Klaus says. 

He coughs.

The silence drags on.

***

He figures it’s been at least seven hours since he first woke up when his eyelids begin to droop. Hard to tell what with the… everything… about the situation, but he knows he’s been here a while now. The third time he finds himself dozing, he sighs and shuffles onto his side. He’s not getting very far, figuratively _or_ literally. He’s exhausted, his body hurts, and everything is awful, so fuck it. Just… fuck it. He’s taking a nap, damnit. Hopefully he’ll think better when he wakes up again.

Only he doesn’t. This is mostly because he wakes up with a shout and a jerk, dreams of clawed hands gunning for his face playing behind his eyes, and hits said face on the casket wall nose-first _again_ , this time resulting in a bloody nose, which is, frankly, _ridiculous_. He lays on his side, groaning and pinching the bridge of his nose, for what feels like hours before the bleeding slows and stops.

The good news is that he can’t currently smell anything but copper. The bad news? He’s got blood in his hair and that shit does not come out easy when it dries. Trust him, he’d know. He’s not the resident expert on that one—that would be Ben—but he’s gotten enough tips and tricks from his brother over the years that it’s basically the same thing.

He sighs for what must be the millionth time. Then he begins feeling down the side of the casket, looking for any of the silk lining that he can use to wipe his hands clean.

He finds some near his knee. He also finds… a wire?

It’s at the very tip of his fingers, just far enough that he can’t get a good grasp on it, though not for lack of trying. He bends his knees and pushes himself down as far as he can go and still can’t quite hook a finger around it. Whatever it is, he must have kicked it to the bottom of the casket while he was panicking earlier.

“Come on,” he grunts, straining until he’s sure his shoulder is going to pop out of place. He’s flexible but he’s not _that_ flexible, damnit. “Come on, come on, come _on_ —”

He can’t do it. He groans, dropping his head back to the stiff cushion on the bottom of the casket. Then he shimmies around the other way, toeing at his left shoe with his right. Why his siblings buried him with shoes he may never know, but he’s been trying to get them off for hours now, in between freak outs and tic tac toe and feeling bad for himself. He hasn’t had any luck yet because they’re a size too small and he can’t reach the laces, but maybe this time he can do it. If he just… pushes… a little… _harder_ …

“ _That_ _’s what she said_ ,” he grunts, and then laughs as his left shoe comes off with a _pop_ , taking the sock with it. Take that, stuffy old man fashion! For real, if they were going to send him off to the afterlife in the most uncomfortable way possible, couldn’t they have at least picked something that wasn’t the tackiest dress shoes ever manufactured?

Whatever. He pulls at the laces of his other shoe with his toes and then works that one off, too, after which he twists again and begins to feel around in the cold with his bare feet. 

He finds the wire fairly quickly. One end is attached to a small box—recording device, maybe?—God, what a sick joke that would be—and the other is attached to—

Oh. Hey, there, headphones. Bless his siblings for burying his walkman with him. Someone is getting a hug for that one. Just as soon as he gets a goddamn shower, anyway.

He works the boxy part of the music player up to knee height with his feet, then focuses on dragging it further an inch at a time with his legs. Soon enough he has his hands on it, and sweet, sweet music is flowing in his ears. 

He hums along, losing himself to it. Good _lord_ has he missed the noise. He stretches out, crossing his ankles and letting his bare foot tap against the side of the casket as he hums along.

This is good. This is fine. He could get used to this.

***

His walkman battery dies after three hours of pure, symphonic bliss. He sighs, sad to see it go. That’s one thing that won’t be coming back from the dead.

Unfortunate. He picks at the dried blood in his mustache, making a face as it flakes away. God, what he wouldn’t do for a bubble bath right now. That’s the first thing he’s going to do when he gets out—he’s going to fill the largest tub that he can find right to the rim with bubbles, and he’s going to sink down so his head is under the water and he’s going to _marinate_. He’ll be in there so long that he’ll be a brand new person when he gets out again, damnit. And then… then he’s going to go shopping. _Clothes_ shopping. And while he’s out he’s going to absolutely _gorge_ himself on chocolate bunnies. Easter was coming up when he went into the ground—they must have chocolate bunnies in the stores by now. Maybe Easter has passed and they’ll be discounted, even. He loves it when that happens. He’s going to make himself absolutely _sick_ on them, just to rub it in the old man’s constipated, monocle-scrunched _face_.

He smiles, tilting his head back. What next, what next, hm… oh! He’s going to stretch and pop his entire goddamn skeleton. He’s tired of doing the corpse pose, damnit. And then take a nap, heck yeah… sprawled out on his bed in his room, nothing but a pair of briefs on, all snuggled up in his comforter… lights on and window open, a nice breeze on his face…

…and when he wakes up, he’ll find one of those grubby garage band concerts to go to, the ones that happen in someone’s basement and have noise that rattles you down to your bones…

…and somewhere in there, preferably sooner rather than later, he’s going to get really, really, _stupidly_ high. And no one is going to stop him, because he died and they buried him and no one gets to say anything about all his bad habits after that.

He sighs, breathing slowly out. The daydream… it’s nice. But it doesn’t do much for his dry, scratchy throat or the pressure in his stomach or the ache of cold in his stiff joints.

He sighs, low in his throat. He hates this. No shit, Klaus, you say—but he does, he hates this, and he _can_ _’t ignore it anymore_. It’s not even his impending death that’s getting to him right now, because at least that would break up the monotony a bit. He’s just so… fucking… _bored_.

…And thirsty. Like christ, it’s funny in a meta sense but he’d literally die for a little water right now. At least in the afterlife he didn’t feel like straight up crusty dick. And it might have been boring there, too, but he could get up and move around. He could pick a direction and walk. It never did much good, because every time he’d try to wander off into the forest he’d wind up back at that one little path like he’d never left it at all, but it broke the monotony a bit. It gave him a sense of purpose, even if he never actually went anywhere.

The casket is like that, only instead of leaving he just daydreams for a bit. He always comes back, though, lying there with the cold and the rot and the dark… specters of his past flashing at the corners of his eyes, disappearing when he turns to look… ghosts shivering somewhere on the edge of his consciousness… so cold, frigid, and he doesn’t know if he’s imagining things but it feels like there are a lot of them, just out of his grasp, somewhere not quite close enough for him to touch.

It’s like they know he’s going to die in here. Like they know his time is growing short.

Isn’t that a morbid thought.

Klaus clicks his dry tongue, fingers twitching with nicotine cravings. When is the last time he had a drink? He actually can’t remember. It must have been a while ago. He died, and before he died they were running around, and before they were running around he was… uh… god, what was he even doing before the house collapsed?

Wait, Ben. Playing patty-cake with Ben. And they had been at that for a while, and before that he was out with Five and Diego at Jenkins’s house… christ, did he stop to have a drink of water at all the day he died?? And he’s been sweating so much… and the day before that he was detoxing and throwing up… or at least he thinks it was the day before that… hm. He’s… not really sure. It’s all a giant blur, at this point. It’s getting kind of hard to think, actually. 

…What was he talking about? Oh, right. Dehydration. The point is that he’s starting to get worried. He’s been in here for maybe twelve, fourteen hours (assuming his internal clock is still functioning properly, which is a big assumption) and he hasn’t run out of oxygen. Okay. Fine. But the next big threat after suffocation is dehydration, and that seems to be coming for him _fast_. If running out of oxygen doesn’t get him, then the dehydration _definitely_ will.

…You can add that to the list of things that Klaus is _not_ looking forward to.

***

He manages to hold on another few hours, at least, before he starts to really feel it. His head is swimming, his eyes gummy and his limbs heavy. His brain is so foggy that he keeps forgetting where he is and trying to move around before he realizes that he can’t. It’s a special flavor of hell every time he remembers. Like those mints that are so minty that you can’t breathe for a few seconds. Anyone else have that problem? No? Just him?

…He’s getting real tired of talking to himself.

Good news, though—it looks like that won’t be the case for much longer. Not when he can’t stay conscious for more than a few minutes at a time. He’s going to die and get shipped back to God in a cardboard box with the words RETURN TO SENDER stamped on the top any minute now. Any minute. Aaany… minute…

It takes a little while. Longer than he thinks it will. But soon enough he closes his eyes to the pitch black of his casket… and opens them again to a clear gray sky, gray clouds drifting past gray trees high above a crisp, gray world.

He sighs, and doesn’t bother to get up off the path he knows he’s lying on. She’s already coming—he can hear the sound of her bicycle bell ringing in the distance. He hears rubber wheels popping against dirt and rocks as she gets closer, until she’s all but on top of him, one foot thrown out to steady her as she stares down at him with her hair hanging down.

“And here I thought I’d have some peace and quiet for a while,” she says, in her usual bored tone.

Klaus doesn’t acknowledge that. Instead he just looks up past her, at the sky. “So it was a no go with the whole ‘being alive’ thing,” he says conversationally.

“You have to go back,” she says in return. Her voice is cold.

Klaus frowns, closing his eyes. “I’m tired.”

“Well suck it up. You can’t stay here.”

“Why not? It’s clearly my time, why can’t I just stick around?” he asks, and his voice is precariously close to a whine right now but he can’t really do anything about it because _fuck_. He’s had an _ordeal_ , thank you very much. He opens his eyes again and finally sits up, reveling in the fact that he doesn’t hurt anymore. “I’ll be quiet, I promise. You won’t even know that I’m here.”

“I always know you’re here,” she says, deadpan.

Klaus throws up his hands. There’s no winning with this one.

“Fine,” he snaps, and pushes himself to a stand. He then begins to stomp off into the forest, huffing. He’s going to go see if he can find something to bash his face into. Just to de-stress a little. A rock or a tree or—

“Not a tree,” God says behind him.

“ _Not a tree_ ,” Klaus mimics. He can practically feel God rolling her eyes, but really, if she didn’t want him to maim himself on a tree she shouldn’t have put trees in the afterlife, now should she? Some things are just common sense.

Ducking his head between his shoulders, Klaus walks until he can no longer see the little forest path. He then plants himself on the ground, criss-cross-applesauce, and begins digging his fingers into the gray dirt. He doesn’t actually want to hurt himself—he’s been hurt plenty in the past few weeks. Months. Years. Whatever. He just—you know—wants to feel like he has any control of the situation. 

He sighs. This whole dying thing… it’s hard to have control like this. When he was on the streets? He had control then. Hell, control was _easy_ then. Whenever the cold fronts started to sweep in and the snow started to come down, all he had to do was go out and find someone who’s bed he could sleep in. He knew himself, knew his body—he was a bit thin, sure, but people were into that. It was easy enough to slip under the sheets with someone. And just like that, he always had what he needed, at least for the night. 

Simple. 

Easy.

He finds a rock in the dirt and begins to work his nails around it. It’s larger than he thinks it is. Like an iceberg, all hidden beneath the surface. After a few minutes of work, however, he has it free—it’s roughly circular and kind of flat on top, perfect for writing on.

Biting the inside of his cheek, Klaus feels around again. He comes up with a smaller rock, one that fits neatly in his fingers. He tosses it back and forth between his hands for a moment before he takes it and puts it to the larger rock, painstakingly scratching a little line. A tally mark. And then beside it, another. Two tally marks. 

One mark for each death. At least for this time around.

He knows that God is pissed. She doesn’t want him here—he understands that. It’s just… he can’t help it. He can’t help it when he dies and comes back to the afterlife. This last death happened through literally no fault of his won. He didn’t exactly _plan_ to get buried in an iron casket, thanks.

“It isn’t my fault,” he says aloud. He knows God can hear him—she hears everything. “You of all people should know that.”

There’s no response, not even the rustle of wind through the leaves around him.

He doesn’t know how long he stays there, sitting by the rock with the tally marks. It could be minutes or it could be days. He doesn’t get hungry or stiff here—time doesn’t really move, not like it does down there. He just… _is_. Eventually he does figure that he should probably go apologize to God, though, so he heaves himself up and dusts off his hands to do just that.

God is waiting at the path, head tilted back in annoyance as her foot taps on the ground. “Apology accepted,” she says. And then, “I still don’t like you.”

Klaus lets his shoulders droop, the mental exhaustion like a physical weight on him. “I know,” he says. Then he feels the tug, the pull of consciousness worming into his being.

“Do try not to come back,” God says, and then Klaus blinks and he’s back in the ground, with the darkness, the cold, the _rot_.

He takes a careful, shallow breath. Just how much air is left, he wonders? Can’t be much now. He shifts, realizing a moment late that he’s feeling properly hydrated again. Enough so that he actually kind of has to pee now. 

“Great,” he says, and scrubs his hands over his face. He grits his teeth, and stares down his casket.

He can do this. He has to do this. And you know what? He fought in Vietnam! He survived a family of seven! And he once wore a sarong to a fraternity party and got a _shitload_ of numbers! So honestly? Fuck it! Klaus Hargreeves may not be stable, reliable, or honest, but by _god_ is he persistent. 

Resolve set, he shifts around and brings his fists up before him, reaching to flex his powers.

It’s time for round two.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 


	4. Two to Tango

There isn’t much to keep you occupied when you can’t interact with anything around you. Ben learned that one the hard way after his death. Watching the world move without him… listening to all the conversations he cannot participate in… that’s about it, and it all starts to blur together after a while. He’s lucky that he had a book in his jacket pocket, at least. Unfortunately, he’s read that thing so many times that he swears it’s seared into his memory.

It’s worse now, he finds. It’s just so… _boring_ without Klaus. Klaus has been dead for coming on two weeks and Five rarely wants to play twenty questions and fuck, Ben used to get bored following Klaus around all the time but at least he had places he could go, someone he could _talk_ to. Now? Now he’s Ben Hargreeves, the amazing intangible man. Unseen, unheard, unfelt, except as a slight drop in the temperature of the room. He sighs.

Nights in the Academy are especially bad. He dreads the time of the evening when his siblings start yawning and the lights start to go out. Klaus never really kept a consistent schedule, so it’s… strange… to be here with Allison and Vanya and Luther, who all go to bed at about the same time every night and get up at about the same time every morning. The only exception in the house right now is Five, but as inconsistent as he is with sleep he makes up for it with the unerring consistency in everything else he does. He practices, he looks at Mom’s schematics, he drinks coffee, he runs out of coffee, he goes out for more coffee… and then he repeats it all over again. It may not be healthy but it’s definitely a routine. Of sorts, anyway.

Ben sighs. He and Five haven’t spoken much since that first conversation so many days ago. Five is busy, and he doesn’t generally appreciate company while he’s working. The fact that he’s always working doesn’t change this. He misses Ben, Ben can tell, but having a ghost for a brother is hard for the guy. Ben thinks it might have something to do with all the years that Five spent on his own in the apocalypse, all alone with nothing but a mannequin and the corpses of his family for company. Ben doesn’t want to psychoanalyze or anything, but that’s a pretty fucked up thing to have happen to a guy.

Point is, even Five doesn’t offer much reprieve from the crushing boredom of being a ghost. Which leaves Ben sitting in the hallway outside his siblings’ rooms, reminiscing.

Tonight he’s thinking about death. He’s been doing that a lot, lately. It’s a topic that he can’t seem to escape, no matter how he tries. Because the thing is… he doesn’t remember a lot about dying. It was painful, he knows that much, but at a certain point he just… stopped processing the pain. Stopped processing the panic, too. And the noise around him and the urgency of the mission and a lot of other things, as well. He stopped processing everything, really. He reached a tipping point where the human world stopped feeling consequential and the spirit realm started to draw him away from the material plane. He closed his eyes… Luther’s screams fading into nothingness… his own breath slowing and slowing and slowing down to nothing… until finally it was over. He stepped out of his mutilated body and into darkness.

He still doesn’t know where he was. That place… the darkness… it wasn’t exactly a human darkness. It was darker and blacker than anything he’d ever seen. Like a black hole, a void, swallowing any and all light that came into contact with it. Every light except… one. It was there… dead ahead… a pinpoint of infinite white brightness that just… it _called_ to him. He didn’t know where he was, but he knew where he was going—into the light, into whatever came for him _after_. 

Just… not yet.

He sat in the black void, watching the light, for what felt like forever. He doesn’t know exactly why he needed to sit, to wait, but he knew he should so he did. Maybe it was just because it was so sudden. Being alive one moment and dead the next… it was a lot to handle. He wanted to see his family again. He wanted to say goodbye.

So he waited. And waited. And then, just when he was thinking that he couldn’t stay here in the void forever, he _heard it_. His name, called out by a familiar voice. It rang, crystal clear, like the echo of a bell, through every particle that made up his soul. He turned away from the light and there… across the way… like a tear in the fabric of the void… was a spark of blue. 

“Klaus?” he called, standing up again. There were no more words, but he knew he’d heard Klaus’s voice call his name. And that blue… that was the blue of Klaus’s powers. It was there, right there. It was calling to him, too—calling him away from the light.

Ben started walking, away from the light behind him and toward the blue. And as he did, the blue started to grow brighter. And brighter. And then brighter again, and again, until it began to rival the light when Ben glanced behind him, outshining it and swallowing the void whole as it spread across the blackness, cracking through it. It was like a beacon, like a storm surge, like lightning forking in slow motion across stormy skies as it reached through the black for Ben. 

Ben squinted, frowning. “Klaus?” he called again. He was still walking, but slower now, watching as the blue—having spread across a third of what was once void and now reaching ever farther—began to twist and turn like a hurricane brewing in the skies. Like a maelstrom, a tornado, a vortex it went, and as it began to kick up into high gear Ben felt the tendrils of blue begin to tug at him, not unlike wind but also not unlike something _alive_ , clawing and fighting and yanking. 

Ben stumbled. “Whoa—” he said, as Klaus’s power continued to surge out and around him. He watched it, struck with awe, until it overtook him, slamming down on him all at once like the might of the ocean crashing against the shore. Until he was wrapped up in it, surrounded by it, at the center of a veritable whirlpool of spinning blue luminance. 

It was here that he realized that Klaus wasn’t just calling to him—he was conjuring him, dragging him from the void and back into the human world. 

It was strange, to feel Klaus’s powers like a current wrapped around his being, moving him not against his will but without his guidance. Strange, but… oddly _exhilarating_. Ben had never seen his brother’s powers before, not really—not like _this_. From a living person’s perspective Klaus’s powers were a little bit of a light show and a lot of talking to thin air. Ben had never thought that Klaus’s powers were particularly strong or useful, really. But from this side of death, as a ghost, a spirit? They were _incredible_. When he came through the other side, into the human world, he looked at Klaus and… that was his _brother_. Hunched over with his hands fisted and his back to Ben, opening a portal to another realm, this incredible mass of blue energy spiraling outward from somewhere inside of him. That was Klaus, in all his preternatural glory. 

And then Ben called out, and Klaus let go of his powers. The opening from the dark void with the white light—the conduit, Ben was tempted to call it—settled back into what Ben supposed was its natural state. It was open, still, but no longer moving, deep, still water rather than a riptide. Klaus’s powers settled back inside his skin. Ben could still feel them, but they were calm, gentle. Klaus felt like… like… a spiritual hotspot. A point of ethereal magnetism, low level but always there, forever drawing Ben toward him no matter how far away he was. It was just… a part of who Klaus was.

Ben meant to say goodbye, that day, out in the gazebo. He meant to cross over into the light and move on to the afterlife. But there was something about Klaus, about his powers, that made Ben hesitate. And that hesitation was all it took—Klaus started talking and Ben knew, right then, that he wasn’t going to leave his brother behind. Klaus was so fragile, so human… he was just a kid. And so was Ben, but it was too late for Ben. But for Klaus? For his breezy, careless brother who spent more time high than sober and whose entire life was stretching out before him, the path to self-destruction clearly marked even at the tender age of sixteen? There was _still time_. Time to help him, time to guide him. Time to convince him to stop hurting himself and live the life he was meant to live.

…Of course, that isn’t how things panned out. Ben sighs, chin resting on one palm and his elbow on his knee. Klaus managed to stumble down the path of self-destruction despite Ben’s every attempt to help or guide or, hell, even just _distract_ him. Ben followed Klaus around for thirteen years and he only ever felt the full force of his power that once. He’s felt the magnetism, sure—whenever Klaus had to detox for whatever reason it would begin to creep back up. But that whirlwind? That storm surge? It was always tamped down, always suppressed by drugs or alcohol or whatever else. Klaus always did his best to stifle every drop of his powers. He’d have nailed the conduit between the worlds shut if given the proper tools to do such a thing. And now Klaus is dead, and Ben… he’ll never feel his brother’s powers again.

_What a strange thing to miss_ , he thinks, a ghost of the teenager he once was, hanging onto the last scraps of a life he once lived, intangible and all alone.

***

Luther gets up around seven, the same as he does every day. He waters the plant on his windowsill, goes to the bathroom, eats breakfast, gets himself dressed, and heads out, same as he does every day. Ben hangs around him until he leaves the house, keeping a respectful distance all the while. Klaus never had a modicum of modesty in his life, but Luther? Whoo, boy. Ben really tries not to watch Luther straight on too much, because he knows that it would make his brother uncomfortable, and that’s the last thing he wants.

Not that Luther has any idea he’s there. Ben has talked with Five, when he can catch Five in a charitable mood, and Five knows that he’s thinking about moving on. Seeking out the light and crossing to the other side. He doesn’t want to tell the rest of his siblings that he’s here just so that he can leave them again. It just… it seems callous to give them their brother back but only for a little bit. It would be a little much to ask of them.

For now, however, he’s here, and he’s resigned to watching them as the others begin to show signs of wakefulness, as well. Allison is up next, because she has an early physical therapy session at the hospital. She spends long minutes in front of her vanity mirror, applying concealer and foundation and eyeliner and lipstick until she’s ready to go out into the world. She sticks her head into Vanya’s room just as Vanya shuffles out of bed, her white hair a rat’s nest around her face. They share some slow, clumsy signs and a little bit of laughter before Allison leaves, crossing paths with Five on her way out the door as he huffs his way into the car to go out for a coffee run. Which leaves…

…Vanya, the sibling that worries Ben the most now that Klaus is gone.

She hasn’t had any more major episodes since the one in the vault, but now that he’s paying attention—now that they’re all paying attention—it’s clear to see that things are not always okay in Vanya-land. It’s in the way she avoids Reginald’s office and everything else in that wing of the house. In the way she seeks out her siblings to keep her company, eyes too wide and fingers trembling at the thought of being alone for too long. In the way her face falls when she gets the notice from her orchestra that she’s been banned from playing with them ever again on account of the damage and destruction she caused. 

It’s in the way she sits with her white violin, stroking the wood with this longing on her face, never quite picking it up but never quite putting it all the way away.

She also hums, sometimes. It’s always the apocalypse suite that she played in the Icarus Theater. And sometimes, when she hums the faster parts, she gets visibly upset and seems to force herself to stop, patting her hands against her thighs to calm herself down. It’s like it plays in her head constantly, the notes clear even though she doesn’t know where they come from or what they mean, the emotions still tied to them somehow. A symphony of anger and fear and a desperate desire to be recognized, to be heard.

Ben bites his lip, waiting for Vanya outside her door while she changes. Maybe that won’t be an issue today. Maybe today will be a good day.

… _Or maybe not_ , he thinks, as Vanya zones out at breakfast and begins to play violin fingerings on her cereal spoon. She realizes what she’s doing a moment later and drops it onto the table with a clatter, her narrow chest rising and falling a little too quickly. When she looks around, it’s with a flinch, as if she’s not expecting the curtains of white hair in her peripherals, like the empty kitchen around her is fundamentally wrong even though it looks exactly the same as ever.

She doesn’t finish her cereal after that. Instead she lets it slowly go soggy as she stares, stares, stares into the bowl.

…The day, amazingly enough, just goes downhill from there. 

Ben notices it during Vanya and Five’s daily powers practice. Vanya is off, the precision she’s slowly started to build nowhere to be seen. She’s distracted, twitchy, and Five has no patience. He calls an end to the session just fifteen minutes in, muttering something about getting serious about this and zapping from the courtyard, leaving Vanya sitting by herself on the cool stone. 

Vanya sits, alone, for a long moment, twirling a strand of her white hair between her fingers, before she heads back inside. 

She meets Luther there, having come back from the boxing gym for lunch. He offers her one of the three sandwiches he made for himself, and she takes it with a quiet thank you. They then sit in an awkward silence for a good ten minutes before Luther seems to catch on that Vanya is a little _too_ quiet.

He clears his throat. “Something on your mind?” he asks, using a tone just shy of ‘leader voice’, which he tends to do when he doesn’t know how else to approach something. It’s been getting better, but jesus, Ben has never seen someone quite as awkward as his brother.

Vanya, meanwhile, shrugs. “Just, um… you know, thinking about some things,” she says, voice barely above a whisper.

They’re quiet for a moment more, Luther crunching at his sandwich, before he coughs and seems to come to a decision.

It’s been a long time coming, if Ben is being honest. He expected Luther to crack and spill the beans about his own role in the near-apocalypse a long time ago. Luther isn’t used to carrying guilt—he’s always been in the right up until this point, or if not in the right, then at least justified in his actions. He’s always done what he thought was correct, the right course of action. The only exception to this was the night at the rave… and at the end of the world, with Vanya and the vault.

Luther sets down his sandwich. “Vanya…” he says.

Vanya looks over, her eyes so wide. “What is it?” she asks, and Ben would swear that she knows what he’s about to say just by the shadows behind her eyes.

Breathing in, Luther meets her eyes. “It’s just… I’ve been thinking about the apocalypse. How I treated you. I… just… I let you down.”

Oh, this is going to be good. He just sounds so constipated, good _lord_. God, Ben would _kill_ to be able to eat some popcorn right now. If only Klaus were here so he could see this, too. He’d get a kick out of watching their siblings attempt emotional maturity. 

Ben sighs. Klaus… well, he isn’t here. It’s just Ben, alone and invisible, watching as Luther and Vanya fumble their way through a charged moment. He hunches in his seat, resting his chin on his hand once more.

Luther, in the meantime, takes another deep breath. “I did… horrible things,” he says. “I could have tried to help you but I thought… I thought it was my job to keep everyone safe. I just… I made everything so much worse than it had to be.”

“Luther…” Vanya says.

He shakes his head. “I never wanted to be the bad guy. I just wanted to tell you… that I’m sorry. For my part in what happened.”

Vanya is quiet a moment. “Oh, are you done?” she asks, when Luther makes no move to say anything else. Luther nods, looking miserable. “Well… I don’t remember what you did, but thank you for apologizing…?”

“Right. Yeah. It’s… I locked you in the vault,” he says, all at once and just barely loud enough to be heard.

Vanya blinks.

Luther winces.

The house groans.

Ben snorts.

And then Vanya nods, pursing her lips. “If you want to make it up to me,” she says, voice slow and careful. “Could you… could you tell me what I did? And not just the ‘you were manipulated’ stuff that Five tells me. Because I know that isn’t the whole story. In my dreams… the music… it’s bad, I know it is. I can feel it. So… please. Would you tell me?”

Luther looks at her for a second, his shoulders hunched and his food forgotten. Then he nods, and the story comes out.

***

Ben watches as Vanya stares at herself in the little desk mirror in her room. Her eyes travel down the length of her fine white hair again and again, gaze fraught with something so fragile that he fears it’ll shatter into tears at any moment.

She knows what Allison did to her when they were kids. She knows what she did to Allison in turn as adults. She knows that she’s hurt and killed and turned all the pain she ever felt back out toward the world. She knows. And there’s something about knowing, about having heard the words, the truth, from someone else’s mouth, that has brought all the crud caught down at the bottom of her psyche up to the surface. She’s rattled at the bars of her forced amnesia, and she’s regretting what that’s shaken up.

Ben sighs, standing at her right-hand side and watching her closely. He recognizes the look on her face from years upon years following Klaus. It was only a matter of time before it all caught up to her, he supposes. Vanya is fighting it, and fighting it hard, but she can’t do it forever. And when it all comes crashing down… what will happen? Will she turn to drugs for numbness or sex for a distraction, like Klaus would have? Like Luther did? Will she blow past her limits and channel her anger through violence like Diego does? Turn obsessive, trying to fix the past, like Five? Live a life in bitter atonement like Allison?

Ben doesn’t know. He wishes he could do something, _anything_ , but the only person he can talk to is Five and Five doesn’t want to talk to him right now. At least, not this version of him. Five wants to save the version of him that was lost thirteen years ago. That version… it just isn’t in the cards. 

Someday, Five will understand that.

Ben sighs. In the end, he can only watch as Vanya finally breaks down, squeezing her eyes closed as tears streak down her face. She sobs once, twice, before she curls over her knees, hands fisted in her hair. That white hair, a symbol of everything she did, everything she lost—

She looks up to the mirror, her face going slack. There’s snot on her lip, tears on her cheeks, red blotches on her face—and Ben sees the moment that she can’t take it any more. 

She stands, stumbling slightly. Downstairs Ben hears the front door open—that’ll be Diego, stopping by for his daily visit. Vanya pays no mind, feeling her way down the hallway. She’s coming up on the bathroom and has just started digging through the drawers, throwing things aside in a frenzy, when Diego scales the staircase and comes up behind her.

“Doing some spring cleaning?” he asks with a snort.

Vanya looks over, her chin trembling and her lips parted on a sob. She’s a sight, to say the least. Ben worries for a moment that Diego is going to turn around and walk away—he’s done it to Klaus enough times over the years, the emotionally stunted bastard—but this time… this time he seems to take it in stride, pursing his lips and slowly entering the bathroom.

“What do you need?” he asks, leaning down a little so he can look Vanya in the eyes. 

She shakes, choking on sobs. “I need it off,” she says. 

“…You’re gonna have to be a little more specific,” Diego says.

“My hair, I can’t—I need it off, I need it gone, it’s wrong and I can’t—I can’t— _please_ —”

“Okay,” Diego says, low and soft, his hands hovering at her elbows, not quite touching. “Okay. Take a deep breath. I have some hair clippers in my car. Let me go get them and we can cut your hair, if that’s what you really want.”

Vanya nods frantically, gasping air. “Thank you—” she says, and Diego nods, pointing her to the edge of the tub so that she’ll sit down. She does, her face buried in her sweater sleeves until he comes back, the clippers in hand.

He’s careful, leaning her over the tub with gentle fingers. Ben has to give it to him—he can be soft when he wants to be. Right now he seems to understand that Vanya needs this, needs care and support, needs the weight lifted as strip after strip her scalp is exposed, not quite shaved down to the skin but close, like peach fuzz. The hair falls in clumps, stark white against the cream-colored porcelain. 

She’s calm by the time he’s done, sniffling just a little from the residual aftershocks of crying so hard. “Diego…” she says, and Ben almost feels like he’s intruding just because of the tone of her voice. 

“What?” Diego asks, passing her a hand mirror.

“If I ever… you know… go off the rails again. You would stop me, right?”

Diego hums, watching her turn the mirror over in her hands for a long moment. “I’d try,” he says, at long last. “But if I’m being honest, I barely made a dent last time. It was like moving a mountain with a goddamn spoon.”

Vanya’s lips twitch upward. “Sorry,” she says.

“Nah, don’t be sorry about that. There are plenty of other things for you to be sorry about. …Why do you ask, though?”

“I just… I don’t think Luther would try. Or Five. Five could put a bullet in my head if he wanted to, but he won’t do it and I just… I don’t want to be the person responsible for causing the end of everything.”

Diego hums. “So don’t be. We all have things we gotta work on.”

Another twitch, and Vanya is nearly smiling now. “You think that’s what this is? Something I have to work on?”

“Yeah. And a few other things.”

“You keep saying that. What other things are there?”

With a snort, Diego plops himself down on the tub beside her. “Christ, where do I _start_?”

“That bad?”

“You wrote a fucking book. _Literally_. Look, I’ll show you,” he says, and leads her downstairs to the living room, where he wanders up and down the shelves until he finds the copy of _Extra-Ordinary_ that lives down there. He pulls it off the shelf and cracks it open with his lip raised, like it’s some bird shit on the windshield of his car. “Here,” he says, and holds it out.

Vanya takes it, clearly uneasy. She looks like she thinks she’s going to get in trouble if she looks at it for too long. “Are you sure you want me to…?” she asks.

Diego purses his lips. Then, gritting his teeth, he nods. “If you want to make up for what you’ve done, you start here,” he says, tapping the cover with two fingers. 

Vanya nods, and with that they sit down together, Diego flipping a knife as Vanya works her way through the book. Ben sits with them, unseen and unheard, as she pulls faces and gasps and winces. At one point in the middle of chapter six she goes, “Oh my god, I said that?!” and Ben throws up his hands and says, “That’s what I said!”

Diego rolls his eyes. “You did. You really freaking did,” he says. “And that’s not even the worst of it.”

Vanya scrubs at her face. “I’m so sorry, that’s… wow. God, I can’t believe I did that.”

And Diego snorts, and Ben rolls his eyes, and it’s not a resolution for the hurt that’s been wrought but it _is_ a start. It’s a step, halting and slow but forward nonetheless. And the fact that Diego has Vanya laughing by the time dinner rolls around, Ben snickering at the two of them in the background, as they joke about getting Allison to help her dye her hair when it starts to grow out again? Yeah. That’s good. That is exactly what Vanya needed.

Ben smiles at the two of them for a long moment before drifting away, leaving them to their moment.

***

He drifts, after that. Dinner comes and dinner goes. Luther stops by just long enough to eat and then leaves for the gym again, with Diego at his side this time. Vanya finishes another chapter of _Extra-Ordinary_ and sits on the couch for a long moment, stroking her own face on the cover, the other hand touching the short hair on the nape of her neck. Allison sits beside her with her workbooks, practicing sign. Five is in the workshop with Mom, still obsessing, obsessing, obsessing… and it’s not perfect. Far from it, really. But Ben is beginning to think that they’ll get through this. Not soon, not for a long time, but some day. And on that day… yeah. He thinks he’ll finally be ready. On the day that he knows his siblings are okay, he’ll move on. He’ll leave them all behind and finally cross into the light and he’ll go search for Klaus in the afterlife. Yeah… that sounds good.

And his siblings start to yawn, and the lights begin to go out, and Ben sits in the hallway just like he does every night, his thoughts wandering like they always do. He’s resigned himself to the boredom of another night alone, knowing that he’s going to have many more just like it. And it hurts, it still hurts that Klaus is gone, that there’s one brother who is never coming back, but Ben can live with that. You know, for a certain value of ‘live’. 

And then…

…just like that…

…as he sits in the hall, his eyes closed, thinking that they’re finally heading toward peace…

…he _feels it_. Weaker than it’s ever been, like it’s muffled behind a concrete wall, he feels this _twinge_ at the edge of his consciousness. A spark of blue lights up in the darkness. And then, a moment later, he hears his name called by a familiar voice.

His eyes snap open, ice flooding his entire being. That feels like Klaus, but it… it can’t be. It fucking _can_ _’t be_. The last time Klaus came back from the dead it was within minutes, not weeks. He’s not back, he’s not, this isn’t real it can’t be real oh _god_ —

—because if it is? If Klaus is back? He’s six feet down in the _fucking ground_ , in an _iron casket_. 

And they buried. Him. _Alive_.

***

The cemetery is dark when Ben appears at the gates moments later. He peers through, eyes peeled for anything out of the ordinary. The place is closed for the night, the light of dusk darkening to nightfall, and at a glance nothing appears out of place. It looks the same as it ever does. The only difference is that the ghosts that mill about the grounds, permanent fixtures of a place haunted by design, have all converged in one spot. That spot? You guessed it—exactly where Ben needs to be right now.

Stepping through the bars of the closed gates, Ben swallows, walking across and through the rows of headstones toward the crowd. Hardly any of the other ghosts acknowledge him, except for a nod here or a glare there. For the most part they’re focused wholly on Klaus’s grave, not parting for Ben as he walks through them but not getting in his way, either. 

Interesting. Ben has never been particularly fond of other ghosts, really, but he’ll chat them up when he gets the chance. He himself has never been what you might call a ‘typical’ ghost but he knows their patterns well enough by now. It’s rare to see a lot of them in one place, and he’s never seen so many of them so focused on one spot. The only other time he’s seen a crowd of ghosts even remotely like this was on the day that Klaus was tortured by Hazel and Cha-Cha. 

He arrives at Klaus’s headstone a moment later. _Klaus Hargreeves, October 1st, 1989 to April 1st, 2019_. Their siblings spent hours arguing over epitaphs the day before the funeral—among other things, of course. The one they settled on was painful in its simplicity, at the time a reminder of their loss. 

_Goodbye, world_ , the headstone says. _It was fun while it lasted_.

Ben grits his teeth. All those little placations he’s given himself since Klaus’s death… all the ‘I’m just waiting for the right time to cross into the light’ and ‘I’m almost ready to go’ and ‘I’ll go when everyone has gotten through this’… they’re all crumbling right before of his eyes. He wasn’t ready. He was never going to be ready. Not without his _brother_ , damnit.

His brother, who needs his _help_.

Taking a deep breath, Ben kneels down in front of the headstone. He’s never been fond of walking through things—it kind of sucks to have solid material in your eyeballs—but if he can just get to Klaus, if he can _reach him_ , all they have to do is get Klaus to make him corporeal for a bit and he can get the others. The others will come, dig him up, save his life… and then everything will be back to normal. All this will be behind them.

He breathes out, and then, head bowed, he closes his eyes and takes the plunge.

Six feet of grave dirt later he reaches the casket. And just like that, he runs into his first real hurdle— _the iron_. He knew that iron makes Klaus’s powers fizzle, but he thought he might be immune to that, being a ghost and all. When he presses his hands to the casket and it presses back like they’re both solid, however, he realizes that the situation is, ahem, _graver_ than he previously thought. 

…He really wishes Klaus could have heard that pun. He’d have laughed himself stupid.

With a grunt, Ben pushes harder. He’s so close, he knows Klaus is there, he’s right there, but he’s still _so far away_. If only he could get just a _little farther_. But no, no matter how hard he pushes he just—can’t— _reach_ —

“ _Damnit_ ,” Ben says a moment later, flopping down onto the surface of Klaus’s grave. The ghosts stare indifferently down at him. Ugh. Why did the one time his siblings actually listened to Dad’s weird-ass stipulations have to be about _this_? 

Ben stares at the clouds drifting across the dark sky for a long moment. Then he slowly sits up, an idea beginning to take root in his head. 

“Please, god, let this work,” he says, and disappears from the cemetery.

***

Five is scribbling in a journal, penning something that looks like a series of weird squiggly lines, when Ben appears behind him in the workshop. Ben doesn’t wait for an opening or a pause to announce his presence—he just walks forward and sticks his hand into Five’s shoulder.

Five twitches, dropping his pen. “What the _hell_?” he demands. 

Ben moves around to Five’s front, hands at the ready, waiting for Five to start the questions. When Five doesn’t, instead reaching for his pen, Ben grunts and prods at him again. 

“I’m _working_ ,” Five huffs. He glares in Ben’s general direction.

Ben rolls his eyes, and prods again. He _knows_ Five is working. He doesn’t _care_. There are times to be respectful, but when your other brother is currently buried alive is decidedly not one of them. They need to get Klaus _out_ , damnit.

Five tries to brush him off again. Ben snarls. He’s had enough of this, already—for the love of god, this is an _emergency_. With that in mind, he steps forward until he’s standing directly inside of Five.

Five shudders at the sudden cold, jerking back. “Okay, okay, I _get it_. What do you _want_?” he asks, throwing down his pen again.

Ben slaps at his hands, impatient. 

Five mutters something rude under his breath, but he raises his hands all the same. “Twenty questions it is,” he then says, annoyed. “First question—am I trying to think of an object?”

Ben slaps at his left hand. _No_.

“Am I trying to think of a place?”

_Yes_.

“Is it a place I’ve been recently?”

_Yes_.

“Is it in the house?”

_No_.

Five purses his lips. “…Is it the cemetery?” he asks.

Ben’s heart would be pounding if it still beat. He all but throws himself at Five, accidentally drawing goosebumps all the way up Five’s arm. 

_YES. YES. YES_.

“…Are you trying to tell me I don’t visit my dead brother’s grave enough?” Five asks, face pinched. “I knew you were sentimental, but—”

“Come _on_ ,” Ben says. Jesus, would it _kill_ him to not be an asshole for _five seconds_?! Ben wants to grab the little guy and shake him, but alas, he cannot. He settles instead for spamming his ‘no’ hand, smacking it repeatedly.

Five grunts, smacking back. “Quit that!” he snaps, his hand going through Ben’s chest. Ben doesn’t quit, not until Five lets out a groan and says, “Fine. Fine! I’m going, keep your damn _pants_ on.”

“ _Thank_ you,” Ben says, and flits out to the car. Five follows a moment later, hunched over in the driver’s seat with a sour expression on his face.

They get to the cemetery a few minutes later. It’s still dark, and the gates are still closed, but neither of these things have ever been an issue for Five. What is an issue are the ghosts—so many of them that the temperature in the cemetery has clearly dropped significantly, if the shiver that runs down Five’s back is any indication.

Welp. No going back now. Ben pays no mind to the rest of the spirits floating about, instead planting both frigid hands on Five’s back until Five sets off toward Klaus’s grave.

They can only get so close before the ghosts are too close together to navigate without hitting them. Five frowns, tilting his head, as one brushes his right side. “Is that you?” he asks. 

_No_ , Ben says. 

Five frowns harder. He’s struggling to piece together what’s going on, that much is clear—but Five is smart. He’s the smartest out of all of them. He’ll figure this out. Any minute now. Just… _any minute_.

Five steps forward, wading through the ghosts he cannot see, until he’s right in front of Klaus’s headstone. Ben watches anxiously as Five’s mouth shapes the epitaph. _Goodbye, world_ … oh, the _irony_. Ben steps up just beside his brother, closing his eyes for a long moment, feeling for the conduit.

It’s still there, strong but distant, pulsing just outside his reach.

“Come on,” he says, to Five. “Come on. Just figure this out. Please. Please. _Please_.”

Five frowns. Then he reaches into his pocket, pulls out a small penlight and a piece of white chalk, kneels before the headstone, and begins to write.

***

“…I still can’t tell what you’re doing,” Five says, pinched and frustrated, some time later. 

It’s been three hours since they arrived at the cemetery, and he’s shivering pretty hard now. That hasn’t stopped him from holding out a hand to Ben, trying to decipher the dits and dots that Ben is using to try and explain the problem. Ben, who was hopeful about the Morse code key that Five scribbled on Klaus’s headstone… _two hours ago_. Now, however? Now he’s equally frustrated, impatient and angry and so, so _scared_. He doesn’t have _time_ for this. But he doesn’t have any other options, now does he?

Five grunts, shaking out his hand and tucking it into his armpit. “It’s too cold here,” he says. “I can’t accurately tell what the temperature change is.”

“Yeah, no kidding,” Ben mutters. “Go back to asking questions. If you just ask the right questions you’ll figure it out, I know you will.”

But Five has already asked so many questions, circling and circling and circling but never quite landing. He just… he doesn’t have enough pieces to put the puzzle together, no matter how many _yes, no, maybe_ answers Ben gives. It doesn’t help that the other ghosts keep getting in the way, so many of them crammed around the grave that Five can hardly breathe without running into one or more. Ben can see Five’s patience growing short, and he dreads the moment that Five finally has enough of the guessing games. He doesn’t know what he’ll do when Five leaves. This is his last hope, _Klaus_ _’s_ last hope—they need this to _work out_.

…Five huffs, dragging a hand down his haggard face. “I’m sorry,” he says, at long last. “Ben, I really am. But I don’t know what you want.”

And then he steps away, his head hanging, and Ben is alone, on the wrong side of the iron casket, watching the pulse of the conduit forever glowing, forever untouchable, the mark of a brother who is trapped in his worst goddamn nightmare.

…This is decidedly not ideal.

Ben hunkers down, pushing through the grave dirt once more until he’s lying on the lid of the casket, eyes closed, listening to the steady _pulse pulse pulse_ of blue. There he stays, so close but so far away. He doesn’t know, but on the far side of the cemetery gates, some distance away, Five has just connected one last wire in Mom’s neck and is watching with exhausted relief as she blinks awake. Diego is out on the streets, knife in hand, waiting for a crime to fight. Luther is asleep, snoring softly in his bed at the Academy. Allison and Vanya are sitting together in Allison’s room, drinking late-night cups of hot chocolate as Allison touches Vanya’s buzzed hair. Everyone, every member of his family, is out in the world, living their lives, doing what they can to get through this, to move on. Every single one… except one. But that one? That missing piece, the one Ben is trying so hard to free? That’s the _only one that matters right now_. Klaus is Ben’s _one priority_ , the only thing he can find in himself to care about. He can’t help, he can’t get his other siblings to the graveyard or write spooky ghost messages or communicate at all, but he can be here. He can stay as close as he can to Klaus, eyes closed, waiting.

He feels it just after sunrise. The conduit beginning to flicker out again. Klaus’s powers are cutting out, and Ben feels a _wrench_ inside of him. Klaus is dying, and Ben can do _absolutely nothing_. He’s been helpless these last two weeks, watching the others struggle to pick up the pieces that their brother left behind, but at least they have each other. Klaus? He’s alone. He’s alone and hurting and Ben has never, not once in all the last thirteen years, felt so _helpless_.

It takes another hour or two after that. The blue flickers, up and down, dimming slowly toward darkness, for a long time before it goes out for good. When it does, Ben clutches at his chest, wishing he could breathe just so he could try and breathe through the pain. This is the third time in a month that he’s felt Klaus die—how many times can his brother go and come back before God decides to keep him? How does Ben get him _out of there_? There has to be a way. There just—there _has to be a way_. Ben will not accept anything less. Not now, and not ever. 

Either he gets Klaus out or he will _destroy himself trying_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 


	5. Tightrope Walking

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The plot requires Five be a dumbass, and thus, Five is a dumbass.

There is no timeline for grief. No matter how many times Allison wishes there was, one does not magically appear. If only there was a quick fix, a schedule to follow, then she’d be fine—she’s always done better when she could plan things out, when she could be in control. 

When it comes to death, she is not in control.

She sighs, a soundless breath of air. She’s sitting in her room at the Academy, lowering her hand from the flower calendar on the wall. The marker in her grip is hard, biting into her skin as she tightens her fingers around it. The X on today’s date, physically the same as every X for every day before it, somehow feels so much more _weighty_ than all the others. It shouldn’t, she knows this on a head level, but it still does. It’s a new month, the first of May… and the day that marks the date that Klaus has been dead for exactly one month. 

It’s a lot to handle, to be honest.

Allison sighs again, pursing her lips. She glances around, peeking at her closed door. No one will disturb her, she’s fairly certain—all her siblings have their own burdens to deal with, their own activities to attend to. Still, she doesn’t want to be heard when she does this. She waits a moment, just listening for signs of her siblings. Nothing, not even the sound of Five jumping around in his room. He must be out. 

She shakes her head. Then she clears her throat, parts her lips, and…

“I miss you,” she says.

The words come out as a croak, thick and squeaky and too airy in all the wrong places. It aches a little, in her throat, to use her voice, but she’s been slowly building up to this, practicing sounds with her physical therapist and strengthening the healing muscles. Three words, one sentence… it isn’t much, not anything that the greater world would be proud of, but… still. It’s an achievement. She’s proud of herself all the same. Proud… but also a little sad. Because there is one person she will never talk to again, no matter how hard she works. One person she can’t bring back. 

She sighs, letting her lips fall closed again. She swallows, hard, staring at that X on the calendar. Thirty-one days… god, it feels like it’s been forever. It feels like it’s been the blink of an eye. It feels like it’s been eternity and it feels like it’s been no time at all. All these long days since she last talked to her brother… time moving relentlessly on… the ceaseless motion of the universe… god. She went nearly thirteen years without talking to Klaus. Thirteen years without a word, any word, spoken between them, and she barely batted an eye. But now? Now, on May first twenty-nineteen? Somehow, someway, one month has snuck up on her like a _punch to the damn gut_. It would be funny, she thinks, if it weren’t so fucking _painful_.

For a long moment, she sits just where she is, her door closed and the X, that _damn X_ , staring down at her. Then she purses her lips and pushes herself to her feet, letting the marker fall to her desk. She can’t control death, no, but she _can_ control her studies. She has signs to learn, grammar to practice. It’s time to put in some work, damnit. 

She never wants to spend another thirteen years without so much as a hello.

***

The house is quiet as Allison heads downstairs. Quiet… but not silent, not like it would be some days growing up, when their father would set them all to silent study, he himself sequestered away in his office. She meets Luther in the kitchen, on a rare day off from the gym. He’s decided in the last week that he’ll be in charge of grocery shopping and restocking the kitchen—not that he really knows anything about the subject. In all the years he’s lived at the Academy he’s never once gotten involved in the day to day running of it, always leaving that to Pogo and Mom and the various services that the two of them arranged. Allison is pretty sure he’s never even been to the grocery store. She certainly hadn’t before meeting Patrick. It was one of the things she had to learn about the real world—with the added challenge of childhood fame and fast-growing Hollywood renown, of course.

Luther jumps and bumps his head on the top of the fridge as she announces her presence with a knock on the counter. “Oh. Didn’t realize you were in the house today,” he says, straightening up. He fiddles with the pencil he’s holding in one hand and the paper in the other. 

<Can I see?> Allison signs slowly, indicating the paper. 

Luther glances at it, clearly resisting the urge to cringe, before he hands it over. She looks it up and down, nodding as she goes. Bread, eggs, milk, cheese, protein powder, marshmallows… basics, essentially. It isn’t until she sees ‘food coloring’ that she raises an eyebrow.

Luther shuffles uncomfortably. “I just thought… we missed Easter and we never got to dye eggs or anything as kids, so I figured we could… you know…” 

Allison does know. It’s been a while since she left the house, but she hasn’t forgotten that desire to seek out all the little pleasures and activities that were denied to them as kids. For her it had more to do with finally getting to try on all the fancy, impractical dresses she always saw in magazines and on TV, but yeah, she gets it. Dyeing eggs… it’s sweet. She did it with Patrick and Claire last year, before everything went to shit. Who is she to discourage him? In fact…

Biting her tongue, Allison reaches for Luther’s pen and begins penning a few more things on his list. Vinegar for the dye, paper clips to make little egg hammocks to get fun stripes and half-n-half eggs… oh, and some white crayons to draw designs and things, of course. She then passes the paper back.

<Important> she signs.

Luther glances at her additions. “Right. Thanks,” he says. He’s got this wry smile curling across his face, like he’s just now realizing just what he’s doing and can’t quite believe he’s doing it. He glances up to her. “…It’s stupid, isn’t it? That I want to dye eggs like a little kid?”

Allison frowns. <No, no> she signs, and then once more with a little more emphasis when Luther doesn’t seem convinced. It _is_ sweet. Even if the others don’t think so, she still does. In fact, if the others have anything to say about it she can _and will_ go to bat for Luther. Just point her in a direction and she’ll go defend his honor, damnit. 

Luther laughs aloud as she mimes beating down anyone who has anything smart to say about egg dyeing. Then he sits down at the table, patting the chair beside him. “How are you doing?” he asks once she’s sitting down, too. He shares a bowl of Easter M&Ms that were hiding under a towel, and Allison takes a handful, tapping her lips. She wants to be honest, to take this moment to be genuine in a way she’s so rarely allowed to be. But it’s hard, still, when she thinks of that X and everything it means. Everything they’ve lost. It’s just… hard.

Luther is quiet as she gathers her thoughts, waiting with that patience that only he has. When she slowly begins to sign to him, fingerspelling a lot of the words that she doesn’t yet know, he nods along like he understands. Because somehow he always does. She doesn’t know how, but there it is—he just _gets her_ , and she’s so grateful to have him as a brother. She doesn’t talk like this with any of the others, even as she gets closer to them after all these years. 

Things are quiet for a little bit after she’s finished. She wipes away a tear that wells up in her eye, careful to not smear her eyeliner. And then another tear, and another. And then she blinks, sniffling a little, and realizes that she meant to ask Luther for his help.

“With what?” he asks, grabbing the tissue box off the counter behind them and holding it out to her.

She mimes making a phone call with her fingers. <Do you mind?> she signs.

“No, I don’t mind at all. You want to do that now?” he asks, half rising to his feet.

<After shopping, maybe?>

“Sure, sure. But in that case I should get going.”

Pff. <I’m coming with you> she signs.

“Oh. Well—”

“Have you children—have you children—have you children had dinner?”

The two of them look toward the door, where Mom is standing. Her missing hand is still stark and out of place—Five hasn’t been able to build the right circuitry to make a replacement yet, and it’s jarring. Right now she has a pretty silk scarf wrapped around the stump, one that Diego found at a thrift shop near the gym, but Allison is still having a hard time adjusting to the difference.

Allison glances at the clock. Then she pulls out her notepad and writes, _Mom, it_ _’s ten thirty in the morning?_

Mom’s eyes skitter over the words, reading and rereading them for a moment before she says, “Is it?”

Allison and Luther share a look. Grace has been… a little off since she came back online. Or maybe a lot off. In addition to being out of sync with the clock, she’s also been having a lot of trouble with new information. Whenever they’ve tried to sit her down to begin learning sign she gets caught in a weird loop where she keeps repeating the same phrase over and over. Five’s theory is that it’s the parameters of her learning algorithm, the limits cinched so tight by her last system update that she’s started to glitch every time she learns new information. Which is all well and fine except for the fact that no one really knows how to overhaul her system without Pogo. It’s an issue, to say the least.

Allison shakes her head. Then she reaches for Mom’s good hand to hold it for a moment. It must be hard, glitching like this. She doesn’t know how much Mom knows about what’s wrong, but sometimes she gets a little distressed about her internal systems not lining up with the real world. 

There’s nothing to be done about it now, unfortunately. All they can really do is sit with her and make sure she doesn’t try and use the stove. So that’s what they do—they sit with Mom for a little while before they agree that they should try and get the shopping done before lunch. They then head out, leaving Mom with some of the silverware and a bottle of silver polish to keep her occupied. Even now she likes to keep her hand busy.

Just as Allison expected, Luther is what you might call ‘out of place’ at the store. She has a big hat and some dark sunglasses that she wears out to disguise herself, but it’s harder for him to disguise the fact that he’s seven feet tall and wider than an oak barrel. The looks they get, lord… Allison rolls her eyes. Then she pulls him down the discount aisle, pointing to the little packs of Easter food dye.

As the trip wears on, she finds her thoughts drawing back to Klaus. It’s amusing, to imagine Klaus going grocery shopping. He likely shoplifted everything he needed over the years instead of paying for it, but she likes to think there were times in his life when he was doing better with his addiction or his home situation. Times when he’d have enough money on hand to buy a meal _and_ his baggie of pills rather than just the baggie of pills. She can imagine him in line at the convenience store, flashing his Hello hand at an overworked cashier, smiling and making small talk because he always had a knack for conversation. He could talk to anybody, dead or alive—she remembers times when they were kids that he’d get caught up in talking to a reporter and end up getting the reporter’s life story rather than the other way around. He was just… charming like that. He needed to be, to distract from his sticky fingers and the distance in his eyes.

She sighs. Then she spots a rack of nail polish in the beauty aisle, drawing her attention away from Luther comparing the look of two packs of bacon. She wanders over, letting her fingers trail over all the rows of colors before she lands on a simple black. A wavering smile overtakes her. God… Klaus always had a thing for black nail polish. Always lifting it and always losing it. He used to steal her black nail polish to paint his toe nails, and he never remembered to put it back. She couldn’t get him to freaking stop. _He would have shoved that bottle in his damn pants and lost track of it sometime the next day_ , she thinks with a rusty laugh. God, she misses that.

“What’s funny?” Luther asks, coming up behind her with the cart.

Allison indicates the nail polish. <K-L-A-U-S> she signs. 

Luther snorts. “God. You know, a few days before he died me and Five kicked him out of a tactical meeting in Five’s van and he robbed the store in front of us out of spite. Or at least I think it was spite. Maybe he just had the munchies, who knows.”

Allison lets out a snort. She pulls out her notepad, scribbling frantically until she can show him, _THAT WAS WHAT HE MEANT BY THE VAN?!!_

Luther laughs. “Yeah, that’s what he was talking about. You should have heard him, though! Me and Five were having this serious conversation and he was going on about chocolate pudding on his ass or whatever the hell—”

<Oh my god> Allison signs. <Oh my _god_.>

…It feels good to laugh, she has to admit.

***

They get home an hour later, laden down with groceries. Mom helps put them away, and then the two of them head off to Dad’s office to use the phone in there. They’ve been doing it a lot in the past month—every few days or so, now that Patrick has allowed Claire to use the phone. She gets so _excited_ to hear from Spaceboy—it always brings a smile to Allison’s lips, even though she herself can’t speak. And Luther has gotten really good at interpreting what she wants him to say—it’s a good setup. The best she could ask for, given the situation.

Today’s call is short and sweet. Luther tells Claire about his plans to dye some eggs and asks for her advice, which she gladly gives. Apparently Patrick let her decoupage some blown eggs that he made for her, covering them with old comic book pages, mostly ones of the Umbrella Academy and Spaceboy. Claire promises to tell her dad to send pictures when Luther asks. She may or may not remember to do it, but the sentiment is there at least. 

Allison smiles, and only feels a little twinge in her heart at the idea that she may never get to see her daughter like this again. But no, she can’t think like that—Patrick has been a little more lenient lately. She has to have hope that she’ll see her daughter in person soon.

They’ve just hung up the phone, all smiles, when Diego and Vanya pass by the doorway, deep in some kind of argument. Allison frowns, exchanging a look with Luther, before she sticks her head out to ask what the two of them are on about _this_ time.

Diego snorts. “Vanya wants to pull a self-sacrifice,” he says.

God. _This_ again. Allison resists the urge to roll her eyes. The two of them have been going back and forth about the cops for a week straight now. Vanya, on the one hand, wants to go and get interviewed by the police to prove her innocence. Or, if not her innocence, then to put things to rights with regards to the murders linked to Leonard/Harold/whomever the fuck. _Diego_ , on the other hand, is convinced that the cops will get a false confession out of her somehow and she’ll get put away whether she actually did anything or not. 

It’s an interesting inversion of where Diego was a month ago with regards to Vanya. Ever since Diego shaved her hair and Vanya picked up _Extra-Ordinary_ the two of them have been… dare Allison say it… acting like actual _siblings_. Up to and including shouting at each other while sharing a (kind of terrible) fruit smoothie that Luther made too much of, making faces the whole time.

Vanya rolls her eyes. “I do not want to ‘self-sacrifice’,” she says, pulling finger quotes around the words. “I just want to see if I can help with the investigation, if I can maybe clear anything up. Maybe there’s a diary I was keeping around that I can give them or something, I don’t know. We can’t hand over Dad’s journal, obviously, but there must be something.”

“There isn’t. I’ve been all over your apartment—there’s nothing there, not even a mention of Jenkins’ fake name anywhere.”

“Wait, you’ve been to my apartment? Without me?” Vanya asks, frowning. 

Diego huffs. “Look. You were unconscious, Pogo was dead, Klaus was gone… I think you can forgive me for trying to find confirmation that our sister wasn’t going to wake up just in time to snap and go on another rampage.”

Vanya pouts. “But… did you look at _everything_? My shower? My fridge? My _underwear_?”

Diego shuts his mouth, looking around at Allison and Luther for help. Allison shakes her head. She’s not touching that one, not with a twelve foot pole. Luther, on the other hand, isn’t meeting anyone’s eye—she frowns, prodding him in the shoulder.

“Luther?” Diego says, sharp eyes on the two of them.

“I… may have also taken a peek around,” Luther says, with a cough.

“ _Really_?” Vanya asks, eyes huge in her face like a kicked puppy.

Diego shakes his head, turning to plant himself in front of her, his arms crossed over his chest. “We can talk about that later. Right now, I need you to _listen_ to me. I know what it’s like to get caught on the wrong side of the system. You know what isn’t fun? _Getting caught on the wrong side of the system_.”

Vanya frowns. “Don’t you have friends at the police station?”

Diego throws up his hands. “That isn’t the point! The point is that cops are assholes. _By design_ , okay. Even the best cops I know are bureaucratic dicks.”

For a moment the hall is silent, Vanya worrying her lower lip between her teeth. Then she shakes her head, pushing past. “I’m doing it,” she says.

“No you are _not_ —” Diego starts, but before he can get any farther Vanya turns, jabbing a finger into his chest.

“This is my life,” she says, and her voice isn’t particularly loud but it _is_ steady, sure in a way that Allison has rarely heard it. “I may not remember it but it’s still mine. I’m living it, right here and right now. I’m _still here_. That means that this is my choice, and I choose to go.”

Diego grits his teeth, and Allison can see the vitriol bubbling up toward the surface. She stands up straighter, ready to intercede should this turn legitimately nasty, but he manages to keep it down for once. And when Vanya reaches out for Allison’s hand so that Allison can take her to the police station, he lets Allison take it without a word.

***

They’re there for several hours, Vanya in the back talking to the detective and Allison waiting anxiously in a hard plastic chair in the lobby. There’s a picture of a good-looking woman on a stand near the doors, wreathed in flowers—Allison has a feeling she knows who it is, though she never met her in person. Diego always was the hardest for her to understand, the one whose life she saw the least. He’s just so secretive, forever turning a cold shoulder toward anyone who tried to approach, her especially. She used to think it was his jealousy toward Luther and the fact that she was closer to Luther than to him, but now she’s beginning to wonder if things would be different if she just… put in a little effort. Vanya is, and look how far they two of them have gotten in the past two weeks. 

Frowning, Allison adjusts her purse on her lap, fiddling with her marker. Oddly enough, Diego never had that kind of distance with Klaus. Klaus, she’s pretty sure, knew where Diego lived even before the not-apocalypse happened. He seemed comfortable asking Diego for rides, too, and Diego, for all his bitching, actually gave them. It wasn’t because Klaus never pissed Diego off, because he pissed him off _constantly_. It just… never stuck. What was it about Klaus that made it so hard to stay mad at him, even for a hot-head like Diego? Allison has never figured it out. And now…

She sighs. Now it’s been one month, and things will never be the same.

“…Allie?” 

Allison is immediately on her feet, reaching for Vanya. The poor girl looks like she’s been through the wringer, but she manages a smile when Allison links their elbows, tilting her head toward the door in a question. 

“Yeah, I’m free to go,” Vanya says. “Turns out they have no evidence linking me to Larold before the night of the concert.”

<What about his death?> Allison signs.

“They’re calling that one self-defense.”

<And the concert itself?>

“No one has pressed charges.”

Allison raises an eyebrow.

“I know, right? But the lawsuits we’ve been getting aren’t criminal suits, they’re civil suits, and I just learned that three of them have been retracted. It’s like I have a guardian angel looking after me.”

Allison shakes her head, a smile curling across her lips. Guardian angel her _ass_. It’s Five, it has to be. She’s going to have to go thank him when they get home. After she puts Vanya down for a nap, because holy _shit_ the girl deserves it after the month she’s had.

Allison is just closing Vanya’s door at the Academy, Vanya tucked into bed with her fluffiest pajamas on, when she spies Diego in his own room, tossing a knife up and down. She stick her head in, waiting for him to notice her.

He doesn’t look up, but he does pause with the knife-tossing. “How’d it go?” he asks. “Do I get to say ‘I told you so’?”

Allison taps on the doorframe, waiting for him to look at her. Then she raises a hand, palm toward her chest and all five fingers out. The sign for five.

Diego sighs. “Figures,” he says. “Little prick must have cleaned out her apartment before I even got there. …Where is he, anyway? Isn’t he supposed to be here?”

Allison frowns. <Is he not?>

“Haven’t seen him. I’m not his keeper, though—maybe you ought to ask Vanya.”

<Vanya and I have been at the police station> Allison signs, slow and unamused.

“Yeah. After I told you not to, so there’s that.”

Allison begins signing again, but it’s too slow for the annoyance building inside her right now. She purses her lips and reaches for her purse.

“Ooh, the notepad is coming out,” Diego says. “I’m in trouble now.”

With a satisfying _whack_ , Allison smacks him on the thigh with the pad. He grunts, glaring over at her, but she pays him no mind, scribbling away. She shows him a moment later.

_Vanya needs to make her own decisions. I tried to make them for her and look what happened. You in particular need to step back and realize what you_ _’re doing when you push her like that. Not only that, but you have to realize what you’re doing to yourself. You can’t protect everyone._

His expression, previously skirting on that perpetual line between annoyed and snarky, turns sour. “Why would I want to?” he asks, standing up. “The world is full of freaks and assholes. Most of them get on fine on their own.”

She glares at him. That isn’t what she meant, and he knows it. 

He glares back, his scarred brow twitching. She waits for him to explode on her—maybe if he yells he’ll get it out of his system—but he doesn’t, just takes a deep breath and pushes past her and into the hall.

She knocks on the wall, trying to get his attention, but he doesn’t turn. With a roll of her eyes she contemplates throwing her purse at him, but he would probably just swing it right back around at her. 

Fine. He can talk to her when he’s ready. In the meantime…

She turns away, throwing her purse into her room instead and heading downstairs toward the workshop. There’s one old man she hasn’t seen today—in a few days, come to think of it—and she’s starting to get just a little worried.

The door is cracked when she reaches it. She opens it quietly, just in case Five is taking one of his rare naps, but… he isn’t there.

Neither is he in the kitchen.

Nor out in the courtyard.

And the car is still here, so…

…where the hell is he?

Allison frowns, bounding back up the stairs toward the residential wing. She’s not usually allowed in Five’s room but she feels as if today is an exception to that rule. She announces herself by knocking softly on the door, easing it open when she gets no response.

Still no Five. Instead she comes face to face with absolute _destruction_.

***

“Wow.”

Allison nods. That’s exactly what she would have said if she could speak. It’s certainly one word for the scene in front of them.

Luther hunches his shoulders to fit through the door frame, stepping gingerly into Five’s room. It’s a mess, to say the least—completely unlike Five. He gets chaotic sometimes, when he’s too deep into a project to deal with the clutter properly, but there’s usually some sort of method to the madness. Right now? There’s no method. Just… madness.

Allison follows Luther inside, watching as he nudges torn books and empty bottles aside. The only thing not covered in trash or scrawling equations is Dolores, who sits demurely at the head of the bed as if guarding it for Five’s return. She has a jaunty little hat on her head and a rolled up map tucked under her good arm. For safe keeping, Allison figures, frowning.

She wades across the room to peek into the wardrobe. No Five. She frowns, turning around and getting Luther’s attention. <Where was he last time?> she asks.

Luther, wrist deep in what looks like a gutted hurricane model, hums. “Uhh… public library, top floor.” He frowns. “I’ve got a fight scheduled tonight but I might have time to help carry him home if you want.”

Allison rolls her eyes. The guy is five foot two at most, she can handle him. 

“Are you sure? Last time he was a mess. Threw up all down my pants. It was the grossest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Again, Allison rolls her eyes. She used to deal with Klaus when he got drunk enough to accidentally climb into her window instead of his own. She can handle Five, thank you very much.

Luther nods, standing up again. He glances around for a moment, a conflicted expression on his face. “Do you… think we should clean some of this up, or…?”

Glancing around as well, Allison frowns. Then she shakes her head. Five will probably get mad if they touch anything more than they already have.

Luther sags with relief. “Oh, thank god. I have been doing Mom’s cleaning routine and it is _hellish_. I don’t know how she does it.”

<Robot> Allison signs.

“Well yeah, but—”

Allison shakes her head, moving past him and out the door. She doesn’t have time for this. She’s starting to get really worried, now—after a quick stop in her room to grab her purse and a jacket that she doesn’t mind getting vomited on, she’s out the door. 

She takes Dad’s car, one of the ones that they found stored at a facility on the outskirts of the city. It’s a bit fancy for her tastes—it makes her feel like she’s not even trying to hide her fame—but it gets good mileage and runs well, something that can’t be said for Diego’s scrap heap of a car. She parks in the library lot, smiling her way inside and taking the stairs two at a time. She rounds the corner and—

—there he is, just like Luther said he would be, sprawled out on the balcony as he stares down into a bottle. There are library patrons hovering around, whispering and pointing, but Allison pays them no mind. Instead she walks over and taps Five on the cheek, drawing his attention.

It takes him a moment to focus on her, raising his head. “So you’ve come for me,” he says, long and low and with a distinct slur. He shuffles where he’s sitting, trying to lean on one elbow, and overshoots by quite a bit, ending up tipping sideways into the railing. He’s approximately hammered, a mixture of too little sleep and too much booze, and it’s still only late afternoon. 

Allison sighs. <Come on, up> she signs.

Five squints at her hands. “I should… I should know what that means but there are… four of you right now and my brain is a sieve. Just… I put things in and they fall right out again. Splat, on the floor.”

Pressing her lips together, Allison pulls out her notepad. _Get up. We_ _’re going home_ , she writes.

Five squints at that, too, raising a finger and dragging it across the words like a kindergartner who is just learning how to read. Once he gets to the end he frowns, shaking his head from side to side in big, sloppy movements.

“Can’t do that,” he says. “Ben wants me to go to the smeh—smeet—smeetery.”

It takes a moment for the words to set in, once Allison has deciphered them. Ben… wants Five… to go to the cemetery. 

…What. 

_What?!_ she writes, underlining it four times.

Five hums, waving a hand in the air as if to wave off the question. He then tries to raise the bottle to his lips.

Allison, fortunately, is quicker, prying it from his fingers. She taps at the notepad insistently.

“Fine, _fine_ ,” he says. He stares at the floor for a long moment, then he raises a hand. “Help me… get me up.”

That seems ill advised given the state of his everything right now, but he’s very insistent that if they’re going to leave they need to go to the cemetery, so Allison loops a hand under his armpit and hauls him to his unsteady feet. He sways, straightening his suit jacket with little fussy motions that just serve to make him more lopsided. Then he begins doing what he must think is walking, which really consists of stumbling over his own shoes in random directions until Allison takes pity on him and hunches down, drawing his thin arm over her shoulders.

Then he starts talking, and he does. Not. Shut. _Up_.

Allison tries to follow, she really does. It’s just that it’s hard to make any sense of it, at all, in the slightest. She has no control of the conversation whatsoever with both her hands occupied, so she just has to watch as he keeps cutting himself off to go in different directions, like his train of thought is on a lazy suzan, spinning all around. First it’s something about talking to Ben and then something about taking one step forward and two steps back (not far off from his actual gait, currently) and then he’s talking about Mom’s code and something something redundancy. By the time they make it to the car, Allison is no closer to understanding him than she was at the top of the building. 

_Go back to Ben_ , she writes, after smacking the button to unlock the car. She pushes her notepad into Five’s face. He leans forward until his nose is nearly touching it, going cross-eyed.

“Right,” he slurs, and hiccups. “Ben.”

Allison nods, setting the notebook down and opening the door for him. She lets him get himself settled, going to search the car, rather fruitlessly, for a plastic bag or something. You know, just in case.

Five lets out a sigh, scooting across to the other side and leaning heavily against the car window. “Don’t… just don’t tell anyone else. About Ben. ‘S just… I’ve let him down so much a’ready.”

Allison gives up on the bag situation, instead leaning over to scrawl some question marks on her notepad. She has… no freaking clue what he’s on about right now. It’s entirely possible that he’s losing his mind, because newsflash… Ben is dead. He’s _been_ dead. The only one who could theoretically talk to him was Klaus, and Klaus is, ahem, _also_ dead.

Five groans, pushing her notebook away. He then begins to slap at his cheeks, pulling his face this way and that as if to sober himself up. “The cemetery,” he says, slightly clearer now, sitting up again and blinking hard. “Just… take me to the cemetery.”

Allison shakes her head, flipping back a few pages to point at ‘home’ again. She needs to get him to bed like two hours ago.

“Fine, I’ll just… go by myself,” he mutters, and fists his hands. His powers start up, winking alive with a flash of blue… only to sputter out again a moment later, like a car that’s out of gas. He groans, flopping back. “Stupid dumb _kid_ _’s body_ …” he mutters. 

Allison pats his cheek, reaching past him to grab the seatbelt and secure his boneless form.

The drive back home is short but eventful, consisting of not one, not two, but _three_ false vomit alarms. On the fourth one Allison very nearly doesn’t pull over. Thank god she does, though, because the fourth one is the charm. She sighs, holding his hair back from his forehead and making sure he doesn’t faceplant.

They get to the Academy a little before seven PM. Either Vanya is just waking up or Five tripping over a coat rack in the entrance hall did the trick, because she meets them at the top of the stairs, her large eyes wide.

“Is he okay?” she asks.

“Vanya!” Five says, throwing out a hand like he’s announcing a contestant on a game show. “You’re—so—alive!”

“Yes…?” she says. “And you’re, um… very drunk. I’m guessing.”

He nods, all serious, before nearly tipping over. “You’re… it’s still so much, isn’t it,” he says gravely. He leans forward, slurring, “You’re struggling so much and I just… can’t… do anything right. I can’t fix _any_ of this. Absolutely… none… of the things are fixable.”

Vanya stares. “What is he talking about?” she asks. “What is there to fix?”

Allison shrugs a shoulder, baffled. She doesn’t have a clue. She goes to guide Five toward his room, but he bats her away, frowning now.

“’Sn’t it obvious?” he asks, brows pinched. “He keeps telling me to go to the cemetery, and I go, because he’s insistent and he’s never… he just… he isn’t like this ‘nless it’s _important_. But here I am, stupid kid me with my stupid baby powers, and I can’t—just—I can’t figure out what—he fucking— _wants_ —”

Vanya and Allison exchange a look. “Five…” Vanya starts, at Allison’s urging, but he’s pulled away from them both, smacking his palms repeatedly against his head in a frustrated motion Allison hasn’t seen since they were kids. 

She waits it out, counting slowly in her head until he slumps, kneeling on the ground with his shoulder pressed against the wall, his head bowed low. His hair is a mess, standing up in all kinds of strange directions instead of the neat part he’s always favored, his youthful face drawn and tired beneath it. He doesn’t resist as she reaches down to help him up again, just rests his sweaty head against her shoulder as she leads him to his room, Vanya following close behind.

“Oh. Wow,” Vanya says, as Allison begins to pick her way across the mess. Allison huffs a laugh. Then she carefully lifts Five, helping him crawl into his bed and settle onto his side.

“I fucked it all up,” Five informs her, as soon as he’s down, staring forlornly from where his head rests against Dolores’s side. 

Allison shakes her head, patting her pocket for her notepad. She pulls it out, writing out a message for him. When she’s done she rips it off the pad, pressing it into his hands. 

_You rest,_ it says. _Sleep it off. We_ _’ll talk again when you wake. In the meantime, I’ll go to the cemetery. Fresh eyes might find something you missed._

Five stares at the message for a long time, his eyes a little glassy. Then he nods. “You’ve gotta… you’ve gotta figure out what I can’t,” he says. “Just… please.”

Allison nods. She’ll do her best, she can promise that. Then she stands, allowing Vanya to take her place, and looks at the clock. It’s still a few hours before the cemetery closes its gates for the night. 

It’s time to visit her brother. Preferably before her other brother loses it completely.

***

The cemetery is frigid when she gets there, despite the fact that the weather is warming up and summer is on its way. Allison frowns as she makes her way down the familiar path to Klaus’s grave, pulling her jacket tighter around her shoulders with her free hand as her breath puffs up white in the last rays of the setting sun. She stopped to pick up some flowers on her way, but she swears it wasn’t this cold at the corner store. If she knew the temperature was going to drop like this tonight she would have picked up a better coat on her way out. 

She comes up to the grave moments later, the frozen grass crunching under her boots. She looks between the flowers and the headstone for a moment, wondering if it’s any use at all if they’re just going to freeze, before she decides to hell with it and puts them down anyway. They’re lilies, the kind with dark purple speckles at the base of the petals that slowly transition to bright orange at the tips. They reminded her of Klaus, though she can’t quite put her finger on why.

She frowns, lips pursed. Then, after a moment of contemplation, she smooths her jacket down under her butt and sits in front of the headstone and the flowers, staring at them both. 

For a long moment, all is quiet. It’s just her, and the headstone, and the cold. She’s not sure what she expected when she decided to come here, honestly. She isn’t sure what Five wants, either, not sure she understands what’s going on. The only thing she knows is that this is important, somehow. If only she could figure out _how_.

With a little sigh, she settles more comfortably on the ground and lets her eyes wander over the cemetery. Across the rows and rows of graves, the neat little trees that decorate the grounds, the mausoleum in the corner and…

She frowns. There, on the other side of the fence, is a group of people walking down the street. That’s not strange. What’s strange is that they’re all in shorts and t-shirts, walking along without a care for the freezing weather.

Allison pulls her jacket tighter around her chest, her breath misty in the cold air. How the hell are they out here without coats? And she can’t see their breath like she can hers, either. 

…That can’t be right.

Standing, Allison treks back past the car lot toward the front gates, peering out. There aren’t many people on the streets, but there are a few, and all of them are in spring clothing. She figures out why when she steps away from the cemetery, taking a few careful paces toward the far side of the block. It gets warmer the farther away she goes, as if she’s stepping away from an open refrigerator. 

Weird.

Tapping a boot against the sidewalk, Allison glances around. Then she begins walking, eyes fixed on the cemetery, going around the circumference of the fence.

It stays consistent. The closer to the cemetery she gets, the colder it is, all the way around. It’s literally just the cemetery grounds that are acting like they never left winter. She’s no expert in weather anomalies, but something is _definitely_ up.

She finds the cemetery caretaker in the little shed at the far side of the grounds, rooting around for a shovel. It takes a moment to get his attention, but then she’s holding up her notepad for him to read. _There_ _’s something going on here_ , it says.

He squints at it. “Uh-huh? Some’in like what?”

_The cold_ , she writes.

“Ah, yeah. That. Strange, ain’t it?” The man scratches his head. “Been like that since mid-April, t’be quite honest. Had a couple of guys out to check some things but no one really knows what’s causin’ it.”

Allison frowns again, and begins to scribble out another question. She’s interrupted by a gasp of recognition.

“Say, you’re one of them Umbrella kids!” the caretaker says, pointing rudely at her face.

Good lord, here they go. Internally, where she doesn’t have to be polite, Allison groans loudly. On the outside, however, she just nods, smiling the fakest smile she has in her arsenal.

The man claps his hands like a little kid. “I knew it!” he says. “That boy they buried here ‘bout a month back—that was The Seance, wasn’t it?”

If she were just slightly less of an actress and slightly more of a trained mercenary, Allison would have decked this guy across the face at that. She is an actress, however, and no matter how it pains her to restrain herself, she does it, nodding along with her fake smile like plastic pulled across her lips. She’s been trying not to read the tabloids at the newsstand at the corner anymore but she should have known that the whole world would know about Klaus’s death. The whole world knew about Ben’s, after all. And their father’s. After all the trouble they got in for Vanya’s concert stunt it was bound to make headlines. It’s just a part and parcel of being a Hargreeves—no such thing as anonymity, even in death.

Allison nods along, trying to keep her eye from twitching as the caretaker goes on about taking his kids to watch their missions when they were younger, about how it’s such a pity that The Horror had to die so young and tragic, and is that why the team happened to break up?

Allison bites the inside of her cheek. Now _there_ _’s_ a can of worms, _jesus_. She pulls out her notepad and fiddles with it for a long moment before writing, _I_ _’m sorry, I have somewhere I need to be_. 

“Oh! I’m sorry to have kept you so long. Just before you go, would you maybe be willing to sign something for my son—?”

***

Allison gets home an hour later, completely drained and unwilling to think about anything serious for the rest of the night. She hates fans. Well, okay, no. She hates weird fans. And paparazzi, ugh. Like how hard is it to realize that if you ask a celebrity a personal question they’re allowed to not answer? She’s had it up to here with the bullshit.

It was so much easier when she was using her ability, honestly. She didn’t do anything really bad, but every once in a while when there was a reporter with a mic who just would not freaking _stop_ she’d say a rumor that their contract was terminated because of too many HR complaints. In an ideal world, assholes like that wouldn’t have been able to get the job in the first place, so she figured she was just doing the world a favor.

Of course, everything has consequences. Even straightforward things like that. She’s learned her lesson about trying to rumor the world into becoming a better place. It just doesn’t work like that. Not with her powers, at least.

She sighs. Then she gets up to pull on some pajamas and snuggle into bed with a book. She falls asleep not too long after that.

Come morning, she wakes up to the sound of Five retching in the hallway bathroom. She glances at the clock—six AM. 

Poor guy. That’s gotta suck. Even if he did, technically, do it to himself.

Shaking her head, she rolls out of bed, padding downstairs to start a pot of coffee. While it brews she goes back to the residential wing, standing outside of the bathroom with her arms crossed and a wince on her face.

He comes out a few minutes later, on foot rather than space-jumping. It’s a testament to how awful he feels right now. He doesn’t so much as look at Allison before he’s holding up a hand, trudging downstairs in search of his morning coffee.

Allison waits until he’s sitting at the table, mug in front of him, before she gently taps the table for his attention.

<The cemetery. That cold. Something to do with Klaus’s grave?> she signs, slow and tedious.

Five stares with shadowed eyes, hunching down further in his seat. “Obviously. What else could it be? I just can’t figure out how it’s _related_.”

Allison purses her lips for a moment before pulling out her notepad so that she can ‘talk’ a little faster. _Tell me what you know_ , she writes.

So he does. He doesn’t mention Ben again, but he does talk about going to the cemetery two weeks back and finding that there were cold spots all over the place. Ghosts, he assumed. They had converged at Klaus’s grave, so many of them that they began to overlap, creating a wall of cold centered around Klaus’s headstone. 

“The cold only grew from there,” he says. “It’s fairly even now, averaging thirty-two degrees all across the cemetery and warming up to normal spring temperatures about fifteen feet outside the cemetery limits. I’ve been there nearly every day in the past two weeks and as far as I can tell there are either hundreds of ghosts crammed into a very small area or the cold is spreading from them via supernatural means.”

_And Klaus_ _…?_

Five huffs. “That’s what I can’t figure out. Klaus is dead. His body was autopsied, which involves cutting open the chest, abdomen, and skull and removing all the organs including the—”

Allison stops him there, waving a hand with her eyes closed.

Five huffs. “Look, all I’m saying is there’s no coming back from that. Even if he wasn’t completely dead at the morgue, the autopsy would have done it. The only thing I can think of that might be happening is that his powers are still somehow active.” 

He pauses there for a long moment, a look of growing discomfort on his youthful face. <What is it?> Allison signs, dread growing in her gut.

Five looks up, his green eyes impossibly wide in his pale face. “…We need to dig him up.”

It takes Allison a moment to process that. When she does, she’s almost tempted to laugh. Klaus couldn’t have peace in life, of _course_ he wouldn’t have it in death. She shakes her head. <No.>

“What do you mean, ‘no’? We need to exhume the body and see if there are any anomalies—”

Allison shakes her head more forcefully. She’s half convinced that Five is losing it right now. He may have been right about the apocalypse, but he also talks to a mannequin. And the whole thing with Ben, and the state of his room, and the drinking, it just… it raises some, ahem, _serious doubts_ about his mental stability. 

_What you need_ , she scribbles on her notepad, _is to sleep_. 

“I slept last night,” Five says, pinched.

Allison rolls her eyes. _Drunken stupors do not count. You know what sleep deprivation does to people. Use that brain of yours_.

“But—”

Already scribbling another note, Allison shakes her head. _We_ _’ll figure this out without disturbing him. Okay?_

Five grunts, running a shaky hand through his hair. “…And if we can’t figure it out? What then?” he asks, and she can see how fine a line he’s treading between ‘okay for another day’ and ‘losing it completely’. He’s dancing on a tightrope slung across the space between skyscrapers, hanging over a drop five times fatal, just waiting for a gust of wind to take him down.

She bites her lip. Then, slowly, she begins to write again.

_Was there anything in the journal we found at Jenkins_ _’ place?_

“No. It was mostly about Vanya,” Five says, dismissive. Then he frowns. “If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say that Dad must have had more of them stashed away somewhere. But where would they be…?”

They pause there, thinking for a long moment. Then, as if a light bulb has gone off, they each turn to the other, and Allison mouths the word ‘mom’ at the same time as Five says it aloud.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Author's Note:**

> Cheers! Tell me what you think!


End file.
